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By definition, Martin Luther King Day both celebrates the end of racial segregation and reminds us of a past this country can never live down. For feminists, a particularly painful aspect of that past is the segregation of the early fight for women’s suffrage. With her new book Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lyching, historian Crystal N. Feimster provides an opportunity to better understand the lack of sympathy between black and white suffragists and how lynching spurred both to the political activism that eventually won women the vote.
Feimster tracks white mob violence—and women’s views of it—from the end of the Civil War to the early 1930s through the perspectives of two prominent suffragists, black journalist Ida B. Wells and white activist Rebecca Latimer Felton. Both used lynching as a platform in their fight for women’s voting rights, but in very different ways.
Felton, a plantation daughter and lifelong segregationist, began to speak out for women’s rights after watching Confederate soldiers abandon Southern women to defend themselves against oncoming Union troops. She began her career lobbying white men to quit their drinking and philandering—mostly with black women—and protect the white women raised to depend on them.
Instead of heeding this criticism, white men began directing public attention to black men’s supposedly rabid appetite for raping white women. As Feimster demonstrates, Southern newspapers of the period gave ample coverage to incidents of black men raping white women but seldom mentioned cases of white men raping anyone, white or black, in the rare cases that women dared report. White men then used the myth of rampant black-on-white rape as a primary justification for lynching.
Ida B. Wells made a name for herself challenging that myth. Her pamphlets Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), from which Feimster borrows her title, and A Red Record (1895) exposed how few lynchings were actually related to rape. But for many years, her claims went unheard among white women, in part because women played a powerful and empowering role in many lynchings. Under the unfortunate heading “Ladies Who Lynch,” Feimster tells us that white women allegedly raped by black men were often allowed to choose their attackers’ punishments and frequently helped mutilate, burn, and shoot the newly hung bodies. Instead of being called unwomanly for their public role in the bloodshed, female lynchers were praised as exemplary protectors of the race.
As late as 1934, The New Yorker commented on women’s continued spectatorship at lynchings with this chilling illustration by Reginald Marsh. White women’s groups didn’t formally acknowledge that most lynchings had nothing to do with rape until after women won the vote, for which they had long felt in competition with black men. And the federal government never passed any of the nearly two hundred pieces of legislation introduced in Congress between 1900 and 1950 to protect African Americans from mob violence.
There are places where Southern Horrors could be tighter, and it’s odd that Feimster mentions the 19th amendment only in passing, instead making Rebecca Felton’s appointment as the first female U.S. Senator, a historic but basically honorary event, the climax of her narrative. Still, this account leaves us with a sense of what made the fights for racial equality and women’s suffrage so complicated and contentious. We’re left, too, with an appreciation of the gumption both Wells and Felton showed entering a political fray resistant to their participation and unable to conceive of changes that seem so obviously necessary in hindsight.
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In today’s Wall Street Journal Dorothy Rabinowitz has a disturbing piece about the role Martha Coakley, who hopes to be elected to Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, played in extending the sickening miscarriages of justice that were the Satantic ritual abuse prosecutions that swept the country in the 1980s. The case of the Amiraults of Massachusetts was one of the most outrageous. This was a family of three—a mother, and her son and daughter—who ran a preschool and were prosecuted and jailed for allegedly committing heinous crimes against children. The accusations were made up. Coakley is not responsible for the initial madness that was this case. But when she became district attorney, after the prosecutions were revealed to be nothing but an abuse of power, she used her power to keep the son, Gerald, who by then had been in prison for more than a decade, from having his sentence commuted. Her theory was that the women were just pawns of the Satanic Gerald, and his conviction should stand. Eventually he was released, but because of Coakley’s efforts, he lives with an ankle monitor under a kind of house arrest, unable to work, ruined. Rabinowitz points out that Coakley thinks the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo has been an outrage. But she is perfectly comfortable being complicit with the destruction of the life of an innocent man in her own state.
Photograph of Martha Coakley by Darren McCollester/Getty Images.
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There's a new study out that says women are bigger fans of true crime—defined by the Web site ScienceDaily as the "genre of nonfiction books is based on gruesome topics such as rape and murder"—than men are. According to research initially published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, "what makes these books appealing to women are relevant in terms of preventing or surviving a crime...By learning escape tips women learn survival strategies they can use if actually kidnapped or held captive."
Reading the research, it seems like the authors are making fairly unfounded assumptions about why women prefer true crime—it doesn't actually seem fear-based at all. In one experiment, participants of both genders were asked to choose between a true crime book that pondered psychological motivations for the killer and another that didn't. More women chose the book that included the psychological motivations. The study's authors write, "Such understanding might increase a woman’s chances of detecting the signs that a jealous ex-lover or stranger may turn violent."
Or maybe women just prefer knowing the psychology of a situation because they find it thrilling—not because they wish to apply it to their own lives. As someone who has read Helter Skelter more than once, I certainly enjoy the true-crime genre, but I don't find tales of violent death intriguing because I fear it happening to me. In the case of Helter Skelter, I was curious about how all those nice suburban high school girls ended up murdering in the name of Charlie Manson and how their stories fit into the cultural upheaval that was going on around them during the '60s. I'm not interested in the Manson women because I secretly fear that my perky girl friends are going to murder me eventually. Still other women may be interested in true crime for more titilating reasons: They're sort of turned on by it. When Daniel Bergner posted calls for women's sexual fantasies on his DoubleX Desire Lab blog, he received many responses from women who enjoyed rape fantasies. Either way, the notion that women who like true crime are only reading it to assuage their fears seems like a misguided intellectual leap.
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In partnership with The Washington Post Magazine, DoubleX contributors debate a new question each week and invite you to join in. This week: With Hollywood awards season in full swing, we wonder: Should men and women be honored in separate categories?
Dana Stevens: One possible answer: Yes, because if they weren't men would just win every year. Best Director is a unisex category and no woman has ever won it. Only three have ever been nominated.
Kerry Howley: Dana rightly points out that the nongendered category of Best Director leads to a mostly male list of honorees. But does anyone think the best response to this is to add an award for "Best Directress"? Doesn't that smack of condescension, or at least of accommodation? Is the division between actors and actresses acceptable just because it's traditional? The division bothers me because award shows are yet another arena in which gender is seen as the dividing line around which human beings must sort themselves. We lavish actors with praise for mutability on the screen, but then demand that their "authentic" identities conform to old categories.
Dana Stevens: Agreed, which is why I wanted to qualify that with "one possible answer." Kerry's example of Best Directress illustrates how unsatisfying the actress category is. It's also worth noting that many female performers now call themselves "actors," which I admit sometimes occasions an eye roll (like when Jessica Alba or someone does it) but makes perfect sense. I know I wouldn't want to be referred to as an '"authoress."
Nina Rastogi: Above and beyond whether gender makes sense as an organizing category for human identity, Kerry, there's the question of whether gender specifically is the best divider for judging excellence in acting. This makes for a fun thought experiment: What about separating the nominees by age? Or by how physically demanding their role was? Frankly, I'd love to see "Best Acting in a Film With a Terrible Script" awarded separately from "Best Acting With a Decent or Better Script.” Now there’s a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. At least the Golden Globes acknowledges this by separating nominees by gender and then by genre.
Amanda Marcotte: It's not in anyone's best interests to combine the categories. Fewer women winning statues would mean many fewer glamorous women crossing the stage in glamorous dresses, and that would drive down the show's ratings. No one wants to watch a sea of tuxedoes. Sadly, while women aren't as respected for their work, they're kept around for visual interest.
Photograph of Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.
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“Temporary Protective Status” is a designation the U.S. government grants to immigrants from countries in particularly dire circumstances, allowing them to live and work freely for up to 18 months. Immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia, and Sudan are eligible. For quite a while now, immigration advocates have been asking the Obama administration to revisit its policy toward Haitians. The hope was that the administration, in all its can-do generosity, would give them a break. It didn’t. In the wake of this earthquake, it still hasn’t.
The recent history of U.S. policy toward Haitian immigrants is pretty ugly, as this fact sheet from the Migration Policy Institute drily details:
Haitian refugees interdicted by the US Coast Guard are not screened to see if they may have valid claims to refugee status. Only those who take the initiative to clearly proclaim their fear of return to Haiti will be allowed to make an asylum claim. Only three of more than 1,000 Haitians intercepted since February 1 have been screened as a result of their protestations, and these three were returned to Haiti without a full asylum hearing. Haitians who reach the United States without being interdicted are put into fast-track removal procedures, during which they are subject to mandatory detention and are not eligible for release on bond. This package of measures is applied only to Haitians.
The emphasis is mine. The disparity between the treatment of Haitians and the treatment of similarly positioned, non-Haitian migrants was glaring even before the earthquake. Both the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration tried to craft a more humane refugee policy with regard to Haitians, only to revert back to the initial repatriation policy for fear of triggering an unsightly wave of migrants. You can only read this history through that particular fear; anything less than large-scale repatriation will bring black, poor, unskilled immigrants to American shores in numbers no politician wants to deal with.
The Obama administration has at least agreed to stop deporting Haitians for the time being, which is a start, though it’s worth noting that Canada didn’t require an earthquake to stop sending Haitians back to the poorest country in the hemisphere. I’m of the opinion that a country that can afford to vagazzle itself can afford to allow refugees from a small country in ruins to work on its shores. And when disaster cash dries up—when Americans stop texting their $5 pledges—remittances remain.
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As reported earlier this week in the journal Nature, biologists at MIT's Whitehead Institute found that the Y chromosome has evolved more rapidly than any other human chromosome. Fabulous. Just when it looked like hard data definitively debunked the notion of innate female inferiority, we find out that the male chromosome is actually a genetic power broker—a far cry from the wisp of DNA scientists had long hypothesized it to be. Researchers believe that the Y's diminutive size, once thought to be the result of genetic decay, actively accelerates evolution.
So are men "more evolved" than women? Not exactly. As the Times noted, "This does not mean that men are evolving faster than women, given that the two belong to the same species, but it could be that the Y’s rate of change drives or influences the evolution of the rest of the human genome." After decades of striving for equal opportunity, men still fill the role of rainmaker in the biological boardroom—in mammals, at least.
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We all have our ways of getting over a rough break-up. Tuesday night, Jennifer Love Hewitt shared her own technique for ending the break-up-blues with George Lopez on his show Lopez Tonight: vagazzling.
No, vagazzling is not an offshoot of the beading sensation the Bedazzler. This is actually a technique of adorning your lady bits in Swarovski crystals. Hewitt claims it "looked like a disco ball down there."
Although I can name far more destructive ways to forget about an ex, this seems to reach a whole new level in strange things celebrities do with their money. I'm especially surprised and appalled this is coming from Hewitt, who only a few years ago refused to take abuse from the tabloids when unflattering rear-end pictures of her surfaced.
Perhaps Swarovski is giving her some sort of sponsorship for this whole thing, also apparently mentioned in her new book The Day I Shot Cupid: Hello, My Name Is Jennifer Love Hewitt and I'm a Love-aholic.
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Hanna, I guess Harold Ford Jr. is attacking Kirsten Gillibrand with the ammunition at hand. But I've also been resenting his flirtation with running for her Senate seat. It seems like a rerun of the Tracy Flick trope from Election we talked so much about when Hillary and Obama faced off: Slickster guy, waltzing in to challenge the earnest hardworking girl. In Gillibrand's case the analogy doesn't entirely fit, since she got to the Senate by appointment. And yet I'm still glad that Ford buried himself with answers like these in his NYT interview this week:
Q. Have you been to Staten Island?
A. I landed there in the helicopter, so I can say yes.
and
Q. Do you commute by subway or car?
A. Normally I commute, it’s easier, in the morning, because I spend time at MSNBC, generally — I don’t really take the subway very often unless it’s wintertime and I can’t get a taxi on Fifth.
Photograph of Kirsten Gillibrand by Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images.
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Yesterday’s New York Times finally (finally, because the subject of the article has been debated all over the Web for nearly a month now) gets to the “plus-sized” model debate with a profile of modeling megastar Crystal Renn. Renn, who is Ford Models' most successful and recognizable plus-sized model, has been making headlines since the release of her memoir Hungry back in October. The profile was occasioned by the release of V magazine’s size issue, which hit stands today and features Renn.
The article rehashes the usual bullet points: Crystal and her colleagues are not plus-sized; they are plus-sized for models. Still, is this a marker of some kind of progress? She is a size 12, after all, which might be plus on the runway, but it’s pretty darn normal in real life.
I believe that the size issue represents a positive challenge to the industry and image-makers. But I’d be lying to myself and DoubleX readers if I didn’t also voice my doubts. What does the pining for all-inclusiveness say about women's narcissism generally? It might seem more equitable for the fashion industry to be more inclusive, but it is also kind of warped for women—all women—to demand representation in a fashion magazine or any publication for that matter. Why does everybody have to be special?
Jezebel contributor Jenna Sauers (an acquaintance) recently had this to say on the matter:“Of course, the other side of the coin is that any time there's diversity in the types of women elevated and glorified by magazines, it's a good thing. Because using makeup, fashion and photography, magazines represent a fantasy — but all types of women deserve to see themselves reflected in that dream.”
It’s tempting to tow this line. But I just don't believe in it.
In the discussion for expanding the industry standard of beauty from the standard mode—symmetrical features, 5'9" and 34-24-34—perhaps we need a reminder that no matter how unfair it is, beauty or charisma or whatever it is that gives a woman that something that snags the eye—well, not every gal’s got it.
I hope magazines continue to employ women who veer significantly from the standard ideal. But that’s different than claiming every woman has the right to see a reflection of herself in a fashion magazine. Because not every woman is appealing to look at.
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