My 17 year-old daughter goes to a school that prides itself on its social justice agenda. Gay couples can walk around holding hands and not get judged. Three of her friends are transitioning genders. Today she told me that during their class discussing racism a group of Jewish students wrote an angry letter of protest that Ava DuVernay’s film Selma did not include the Jews who were on the side of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Some student from some class writes an angry letter every week about a certain group being excluded from the topic at hand. This kind of debate at her school is encouraged, and should be.
For my daughter’s generation, on Tumblr every day is a new outrage, a new protest, a new issue coming up — someone is offended about something. The next day, that outrage has inexplicably vanished (though recorded and filed away on the what-not-to-do-list) and is replaced with a new and different outrage. 20,000 read-mores later, the birth of a hashtag as news filler, and maybe a story on the nightly news — but has anything really changed anywhere for anyone?
We’ve been living with reactionary outrage culture for a while now. Good or bad things can come from people assembling into large groups. It can turn into a protest movement or it can turn into an angry mob. Lately, though, it seems like the beast of outrage is getting hungrier.
Does it help anyone to overreact to something Gwyneth Paltrow said in an interview? It whips people up into a hashtag frenzy, only to be clarified the next day. Does it help anyone to latch onto a misspoken reply and then accuse Matt Damon of being a homophobe, a charge that anyone should know is false if they gave it a minute of thought. Or do we do it just because he’s the outrage meal of the day.
The problem with outrage culture when it comes to the Oscar race is that it can also help or do real harm to so-called progress. It took a long time to get to the point where a black female director had a strong potentially shot at a Best Director Oscar. Ava DuVernay became the first black woman to be nominated for a Golden Globe. But because of one scene in Selma involving LBJ, white men everywhere banded together and formed an outrage mob. Because we still live in a patriarchy (despite the outrage cycles against it) that story made it to high places — CNN, TIME and even NBC Nightly News. Resist this as I did, the controversy still drew a sharp line between white men and everyone else.
If any bruised men were genuinely offended, they ought to have DuVernay brought forward to say, “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings,” with a schoolteacher standing behind her to supervise. Caught up in the sting of their own knee-scrape, they seemed unable to separate that scene from the bigger picture at hand — what Selma represented, who wrote it, who directed it, and the radical change it embodied just by its mere presence in the Oscar race. To me it was crybaby caterwauling that did nothing but destroy the potential celebration of DuVernay.
For people like me who have spent more than a decade advocating for black filmmakers and women directors — or, hell, even championing films ABOUT women — it’s been heartbreaking to watch the last two days of outrage all but destroy Suffragette, the only film in the Oscar race that is written by, produced by, directed by women; a film starring women, by and about women evolving, changing their minds and deciding to fight. Specifically, one woman who worked as a laundress whose own life was being smothered by the patriarchal strangle-hold on her rights.
Target: Meryl Streep
She says she’s a humanist not a feminist.
She plays Emmeline Pankhurst in Suffragette.
She wears a t-shirt for a photo-shoot, offensive to many, that says “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave.”
Another offensive quote by Pankhurst is brought up.
Pankhurst made racist remarks, Streep plays that role, therefore Meryl Streep must be a racist.
Suffragette is a racist film because it doesn’t cover black suffragettes
#feminismsowhite
Boycott Suffragette
What began as a stupid decision to have four white actresses wear that t-shirt spread like wildfire around the internet in typical internet meme fashion, shared here and there with millions of easy mouse-clicks. Essentially, for anyone who spends anytime at all online, we are all of us watching an ongoing daily slideshow of images and memes that serve to confirm or offend our beliefs. We watch this endless parade of images and react to them with the hair-trigger twitch of our fingertips. Thanks to sites like Buzzfeed, Tumblr and Facebook the images and memes become clickbait, driving traffic to websites to help pay their bills.
There’s understandable indignation over Pankhurst’s most potentially damning quote, where it was said that a society that denied women the right to vote had “grown the most appalling slavery, compared with which negro slavery falls into insignificance.” Although those words were apparently printed in 1913 in a pamphlet from the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union), there can be no clear defense of it because no one has been able to find the full context. Aside from a passing reference in a book by Christina Bolt, further details about its origins or precise authorship do not appear anywhere online, or in any biography of Pankhurst. Moreover, the footnote to the quote cites another book called “In the Company of Educated Women,” but a quick search of that text (which has the subtitle: A History of Women and Higher Education in America) does not turn up the name Pankhurst, nor the quote itself. Perhaps in some archival text somewhere it can be found — and I’m not saying it isn’t true. But as of now there is no way to double check its attribution or, more importantly, check it for context. In the absence of better evidence, can we not give her the benefit of the doubt? But no. Outrage culture does not allow for that. Stone first, ask questions later.
Probably no one bothered to research Pankhurst’s own writings on slavery, which can be easily found. This is from her autobiography:
“Young as I was—I could not have been older than five years—I knew perfectly well the meaning of the words slavery and emancipation. From infancy I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession. Broadly speaking, the propertied classes were pro-slavery, but there were many [Pg 2]exceptions to the rule. Most of those who formed the circle of our family friends were opposed to slavery, and my father, Robert Goulden, was always a most ardent abolitionist. He was prominent enough in the movement to be appointed on a committee to meet and welcome Henry Ward Beecher when he arrived in England for a lecture tour. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was so great a favourite with my mother that she used it continually as a source of bedtime stories for our fascinated ears. Those stories, told almost fifty years ago, are as fresh in my mind to-day as events detailed in the morning’s papers. Indeed they are more vivid, because they made a much deeper impression on my consciousness. I can still definitely recall the thrill I experienced every time my mother related the tale of Eliza’s race for freedom over the broken ice of the Ohio River, the agonizing pursuit, and the final rescue at the hands of the determined old Quaker. Another thrilling tale was the story of a negro boy’s flight from the plantation of his cruel master. The boy had never seen a railroad train, and when, staggering along the unfamiliar railroad track, he heard the roar of an approaching train, the clattering car-wheels seemed to his strained imagination to be repeating over and over again the awful words, “Catch a nigger—catch a nigger—catch a nigger—” This was a terrible story, and throughout my childhood, whenever I rode in a train, I thought of that poor runaway slave escaping from the pursuing monster.”
Even if the offensive quote was written by Pankhurst, and even if she indulged in rhetorical hyperbole in her feelings that women’s lack of the right to vote was more significant than the plight of African-American slaves — it would rightly reveal her insensitivity but should not necessarily condemn her as a racist.
Suffragette is about one woman whose mind is changed to become a suffragette. It is not about the entire movement.
If there is any good thing about the hysteria whipped up yesterday, it may be to provide a platform to the deeper and essential discussion about how minorities were marginalized during the suffragette movement. Unfortunately though, it seems that this could not be discussed without generating that catchy hashtag — “#feminismsowhite” — as though nothing in feminism was of value anymore. One woman said that white women got the right to vote before black women did — and this is not technically true. It’s just that black women, like black men, in hardcore racist Southern states were disenfranchised because of the Jim Crow laws. While it’s true that many white feminists 110 years ago did not fight as hard as they should have for their sisters of color and deserve to be held accountable for that, I’m not sure the filmmakers behind Suffragette are the right targets for that rage and criticism.
The thing about the Oscar race, though, is that controversy can make all the difference between whether a film is even seen or not. Last year, the pseudo controversy that flared up rather suspiciously around Selma gave voters a handy reason not to watch the movie, audience members a reason not to buy a ticket, and a pitiful segment of chronically defensive white folks everywhere a chance to feel victimized. Now, women will have a reason to buy a ticket to a film starring a white man (because almost all of them always do) rather than buy a ticket to #feminismsowhite Suffragette.
Today, Meryl Streep and Emmeline Pankhurst are the racists du jour. But the worm will turn. You have to ask yourself, when will it turn on you? More importantly, what does protesting a movie that barely got made in the first place do for your larger cause? And where were you when films by and about black women, for instance, hit the box office? I know I dropped the ball on Gina Price-Bythwood’s Beyond the Lights while my friends Kris Tapley and Mark Harris did not. Guess how much that movie made at the box office? $14 million.
Why didn’t more people buy a ticket to see the movie about the Mexican American track team called McFarland, USA — which made a respectable $40 million. The clickety click of outrage culture is reacting to the slideshow.
Last year when the #oscarssowhite hashtag made news, it probably helped get Selma a Best Picture nomination, but receiving only two nominations assured it would go no further than that. And guess what? There are three films this year headed into the Oscar race with black leads — Beasts of No Nation (still the best film of the year), Creed and Concussion. If none of them get in we will once again be headed for #oscarssowhite.
Controversy puts a stink on something that takes years to wear off. Selma was just a movie. It didn’t threaten LBJ’s legacy any more than Suffragette diminishes the suffering of slaves (ask yourself how stupid a person would have to be to look at that t-shirt and think it let white people off the hook for slavery) and the ongoing struggle to emerge out from under the many remnants and reiterations of devastating Jim Crow laws. They’re movies. Right? You know, art? Open to interpretation and discussion?
If you were one of the people who was genuinely offended by the t-shirt Meryl Streep was wearing, it is not my place to tell you how you’re supposed to feel. But if you looked at that t-shirt and saw a cackling racist witch dancing on the graves of millions of dead African American slaves? Well, that’s a different story entirely. Can’t the debate take place without reckless character assassination? I guess not because in the end no one really minds the patriarchy in charge it if means they can spend an entire day pointing an accusatory finger at someone and watching them go down.
The wheel of outrage goes round and round. Where it stops, nobody knows. The reason there are so many articles that accuse people of things they’re not guilty of is that it draws eyeballs. Outrage is clickbait profit for many websites with no end in site. I think we pay too high of a collective cost for this — we destroy too much in the process.
Coming soon to an outrage twitter feed near you: any film not about straight white men who have all the freedom in the world to remain in power.
@Steven Kane
I saw that coming. In the movie when they introduced him and his last name was Kapoor, I was like “Him?” Not for nothing but was Naveen Andrews busy? He’s much hotter.
Just read there’s some group that’s pissed at the filmmakers of The Martian for changing an Asian character in the book to a half-Asian, half-African American (or Nigerian Brit as is the actor). Guess they didn’t know Irrfan Kahn was originally cast but he dropped out due to a scheduling conflict and they needed somebody on the fly.
As for political correctness, I won’t repeat the mini-essay I penned earlier here in the year defending PC. Frankly, I find that those who reflexively dismiss PC are those who consistently fail to demonstrate even the simplest awareness that sometimes, one should use a filter when speaking or writing (Jeff Wells, cough). Like just about everything else, PC can be taken too far (and can indeed stifle art, much less communication) but at that point it’s not really about PC as it is being over-sensitive.
Granted the line between over-sensitivity and reasonable levels of PC isn’t always clearly demarcated. Still, PC for me is about respect – an extension of the Golden Rule. It’s about empathy and recognition of different situations and paradigms. And like Paddy, I too will defend it with every fiber of my being.
This post should be commended for providing a fair and even handed assessment of this entire debacle (which will be yesterday’s news soon enough, to the relief of many I’m sure). The online social justice outrage movement has its heart in the right place, but not every lapse, mistake, or slip-up is a nail that needs to be impulsively bashed in by a sledgehammer. All that does is contribute to the coarsening of an already pathetic state of public discourse on any number of issues and problems. Passionate activism is good, but like everything else, it needs to be exercised with some moderation and, more importantly, reason. The vitriol from this fracas that was directed at those involved with crafting Suffragette was horribly misguided.
Still, I firmly believe that the shirts were inappropriate. I’ve been consistent with saying that I don’t condemn anyone for the flap, but the underlying issue (the uncomfortable history between racism and suffrage movements in general) should be discussed, and I believe that even given the state of public discourse I bemoaned just a few sentences ago, we shouldn’t shy away from having a reasonable discussion on complicated issues and their histories.
As for the problematic Emmeline Parkhurst quote about comparing the struggle for female enfranchisement in the UK to negro slavery (which I believe I was the first to bring up around here), I too have been unable to pinpoint the primary source of the quote. But it is relevant to acknowledge Parkhurst did use similarly problematic analogizing during a speech she delivered in New York in 1913, titled “Why We Are Militant” (reproduced from “Suffrage and the Parkhursts” by Jane Marcus, P. 157):
Parkhurst was a keen tactician who was renowned for using verbal hyperbole to engender support. It is known she corresponded with William Lloyd Garrison, so it’s not a stretch to infer she was well aware of the complexities of negro slavery and racial issues in America. Similarly, it’s reasonable to infer that she was well aware that (unfortunately) many prominent American suffragists and women’s rights activists embraced using racial demagoguery to attract support from white males (and after the 19th Amendment was ratified, many suffragists supported Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised black women in the South). So from a consequentialist ethos, it was probably a no-brainer for Parkhurst and other suffragettes to use racially loaded language to rally people behind their banner.
Like Rob Y and as a POC myself, I really dislike comparative discrimination. Each group, each class has their own unique challenges and histories. These differences need to be recognized instead of dismissed or marginalized.
But tone-deaf diction aside, do I believe Parkhurst and the other suffragettes should be tarred and feathered for using racial hyperbole in their speeches? No. And as unfortunate as it was, my overall opinion of the suffragettes in both US and UK remains positive. Their struggle was real, and the outcome they attained was genuine progress for millions of women.
That said, I do believe this uncomfortable, complicated reality does need to be acknowledged instead of ignored. Even if our general attitudes and perspectives on racism have evolved from what they were 100 years ago, we should not shy away in critically appraising historical figures and movements. There are plenty of heroes throughout history, but very few immaculate saints. Instead of oversimplifying the past, we should embrace complexity, recognize that even our greatest leaders and activists, our best heroes had their warts and blind spots, that historical events and movements were varying shades of grey instead of black and white. The quicker we adopt this POV, the better we will understand our history and the better equipped we will be to safeguard against repeating past mistakes in the future.
Well, now I’ll be sure to see this film ever more!
“Let’s allow that some movies are about ONE THING and let those movies be about that one thing.” The film is about the suffragette movement and asian sufragettes were part of it, for them to be left out it’s not only dissapointing but also not historically correct.
The film is about the suffragette movement and asian sufragettes were part of it
Sounds like a brilliant miniseries. ATTN: Netflix + Ken Burns
everyone on twitter is scared to RT this because they don’t know what I mean by it.
https://twitter.com/filmystic/status/652171661144367104
everyone too worried to touch the touchy topic.
Paddy and Ryan:
I did say ‘EXAGGERATED forms of political correctness’, I have a problem with that, and I have a problem every time PC is being used to silence artists or artistic expressions. Period.
PC can indeed be anything you put into it, it’s the most slippery of concept, I’m very aware of that. I was in a grumpy mood last night, I guess… sometimes you overstate things to make a point. This was one such instance.
I stand by my words, but at the same time, they don’t fully deliver my version of the truth because PC is too complicated a concept to get hold of – especially if you want everyone to understand what you’re actually trying to say (and not just the ones who already agree with you or know your position).
But, yes, PC can be a useful weapon when confronted with something like hate speech. It’s nice to have a set of norms to refer to, some kind of basic human standards of decency, when the public space is being tainted with hateful words about this or that minority for instance. The fact that certain standards seem to be ingrained in the common psyche of a society can be a strong and constructive motivator that helps us all in reconsidering our actions every time we stray over some ‘invisible’ line of decency. If THAT’S PC, I’m all for it.
julian the emperor, I forgot to make clear that I agree with you and Paddy both. I was trying to build a bridge between you two, but then it became all about the bridge and not the two points I was trying to join. In this metaphor, I AM The Bridge, so naturally I lit that thing up like it was a Christmas tree and forgot to give you both credit for being the two smart destinations on either side of me. And by me I mean me me ME.
And remember that the Contagious Diseases Act has only been fully repealed in 1889. The act allowed for the police to arrest any women whom they suspect of being involved in prostitution and subject her to a forced medical examination to check for venereal disease.
The provisions of the act were widely abused and were used against women campaigning for equal rights.
And remember that the Contagious Diseases Act has only been fully repealed in 1889. The act allowed for the police to arrest any women whom they suspect of being involved in prostitution…
Matt. oh. yes. I almost forgot all that. [*goes beck to reorder the book whose order I canceled yesterday*]
This should be opening a discussion on how this movie is all white women.
Ariel. I understand your frustration, and what you say has a lot of truth to it. But a movie that examines an era when circumstances ignored women of color will not have a lot women of color in it. Much the same way The Damnable King’s Speech didn’t have a lot of PoC in it. Sucks. Movies about royalty don’t ever have many roles for people of color. (well, The Last Emperor, but nobody likes that movie around here but me).
All movies cannot include all stories about all things. The story you want to see told does need to be told. This isn’t that story. Sucks. I do agree it sucks. But you know what other movies don’t have plot lines about people of color? Almost ALL movies.
So let’s cut Suffragette some slack and appreciate it for the important story it does tell. Meanwhile, the discussion you want to hear can still happen, and we hope the discussion will lead to more movies about the all the great untold stories that deserve their own movies.
Let’s allow that some movies are about ONE THING and let those movies be about that one thing. (And this way we can avoid hearing some white asshole cry about how there are no white rappers in Straight Outta Compton.)
Why hasn’t this sparked discussion in how the suffragette movement used white supremacist tactics for their own goals? Why is white liberal media simply branding this as “political correctness” (which is just some term white men made up to turn basic respect into controversy just so bigots can keep being bigots). This should be opening a discussion on how this movie is all white women. It brands women’s rights as a white women movement. It ignores women of colour. This issue is deeper than a fucking t-shirt. There’s more to be discussed, but everyone’s too busy sidelining away from the real problem.
What has been missing from the discussion almost everywhere is a bit of further historical context. When at the London Pavilion on 14 July 1913, Emmeline Pankhurst declared she would rather be a rebel than a slave, it’s important to understand that she had been a victim of the Cat and Mouse Act. Imprisoned suffragettes who embarked on hunger strike were at first force-fed. When public protest made this politically unacceptable, they passed a temporary discharge act so that hunger striking women could be released on license. And then re-arrested when their health had improved. By the summer of 1913, Emmeline had been locked up, released and rearrested many times and was very unwell. Emily Davison had been killed the previous month
It’s also worth noting that there was a campaign against forced prostitution at the time – known as the “white slave” trade. Pankhurst had criticised legislation against “white slavery” in this sense on the grounds that as long as women were not able to earn a living on an equal basis with men, they would always be vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
Just to confirm what others have pointed out.
I have Christine Bolt’s “The Women’s Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s” (1993) in front of me. There seems to be a print-on-demand edition which is what people are finding online.
The “appalling slavery” comment appears on p.190, and the relevant note 29 is given on p.353.
As has been said, the note provides a range of citations to several points, and it is not necessarily easy to attribute each citation to a particular point.
I agree that it looks like the quote probably comes from the 1912 letter from Pankhurst to Eleanor Garrison.
“In the Company of Educated Women” is cited in a note with the same number (29) in a different chapter. It’s one of those books where citation numbers start again from 1 for each chapter, which can confuse when viewing online.
Julian, please don’t buy into the bigoted rhetoric against political correctness. Being politically correct means standing up for marginalised people, supporting the rights of everyone to be treated with the same level of respect as everyone else. Political correctness ensures that minorities and people who suffer prejudice and abuse on the grounds of their identity can be supported and protected, and regarded as equal to the straight, white, rich men who have felt for too long that society and culture are theirs to run.
I read somewhere that on some American campuses it’s no longer deemed appropriate to teach classes in stuff like ‘Huckleberry Finn’ because the N-word gets thrown around in there.
This is not political correctness. This is over-sensitivity. This is illogical and unreasonable. The most basic principle of political correctness is that it is correct, and what you state is an example of a silly overreaction. Those who are too lazy to confront their prejudices or too ignorant to even acknowledge them pride themselves on being ‘un-PC’, and have succeeded in tarnishing the concept of political correctness by equating it with situations such as the one which you refer to. They’ve given everyone free reign once again to spout bigotry and rudeness and to get away with it, simply because they’re joining in the noble struggle against political correctness! And people lap it up in agreement, too lazy and/or ignorant to adjust their way of thinking or speaking, content to know that they have equally lazy and ignorant allies in the fight against equality, since that it what this essentially amounts to.
The tl;dr version: Political correctness is not equivalent to over-sensitivity. Bigots want us to believe it is, since it makes it easier for them to perpetuate their bigotry. Political correctness is equivalent to equal respect for all. It’s what’s noble here, and I’ll defend it until I die.
julian the emperor, and Paddy.
Me, I have learned to hold the honorable concept of political correctness to my heart and just let go of the term ‘Politically Correct,’ because the terminology “PC” has been bastardized and tainted by so many idiots with their own catchy smartass agendas, both left and right, it’s a mess, it’s ruined, I don’t want to hear it anymore.
Bill Maher fucked it up. Dinesh D’Souza fucked it up even worse. Bill Maher, someone I like, with his hipper-than-thou Politically Incorrect shit: “hey look at me, all cool and incorrect.” No. Because then in the hands of anyone who’s not as smart as Maher (which is most everybody) it quickly becomes a license to be a reckless inconsiderate asshole. Don’t make me name names. (ok, one name: Jeff Wells). Wearing the Badge of Honor of Incorrectness. No. You’re just wearing the Asshole Badge, asshole. Then there are the Dinesh D’Souzas, misappropriating the righteous concept of thoughtful political correctness and turning it against liberals every single time we try to stand up for all the principles that Paddy rightly and proudly wants to champion.
Doing and thinking the politically correct thing for all the right reasons has been turned into something to gaspingly pearl-clutchify on the Right and something to mockingly snarkify on the Left.
I love the concept, hate the term. Nobody uses it the right way, too many willfully misunderstand it, and everybody wants to claim it for their own crude reasons. Let the lazy thinkers and trite writers have the stupid term and instead let’s just focus on standing up for what’s actually “correct” (as Paddy emphasizes) and not worry about labeling every fucking thing with a phrase that has meant so many different things that it has been rendered meaningless.
“Wasn’t it Meryl Streep who derailed Emma Thompson’s chance at Oscar a few years back because she was in that movie about Walt Disney?”
For goodness’ sake, no, Streep didn’t ruin Thompson’s Oscar chances. She spoke the truth.
Wasn’t it Meryl Streep who derailed Emma Thompson’s chance at Oscar a few years back because she was in that movie about Walt Disney? Put everyone off seeing the film if I remember. Sounds like this is an episode of ‘As the Campaign Worm Turns”.
Julian the Emperor: “I’m outraged every single time ANY artist has to bow down to some form of politically motivated hyper-alertness or hyper-sensitivity in thrall to the demands of exaggerated forms of political correctness.”
AMEN!
You sum up my feelings perfectly (and much better than I could).
Thanks Julian!
Political correctness will eventually kill all debate. Seriously. It’s one of the saddest and most disheartening ‘trends’ in Western culture (oh no, did I say something wrong there? ‘Western’ doesn’t exactly connote a diverse understanding of what constitutes American or European culture, especially not in the year 2015. It rather connotes some monocultural behemoth bullshit that we MUST get rid of…. right? RIGHT? I better delete that word… you know what? FUCK no!).
I read somewhere that on some American campuses it’s no longer deemed appropriate to teach classes in stuff like ‘Huckleberry Finn’ because the N-word gets thrown around in there. I’m too lazy to come up with any good, bulletproof examples of the kind, but I’m outraged every single time ANY artist has to bow down to some form of politically motivated hyper-alertness or hyper-sensitivity in thrall to the demands of exaggerated forms of political correctness.
About this Pankhurst-quote: The thing is, in the current climate of public discourse, it kind of surprises me that neither Streep nor Mulligan were aware of the fact that ‘slave’ could incite some reaction, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t damn well do as they please. You’re simply stupid if you think of Streep as a ‘racist’ for flaunting that slogan.
I shudder to think of the ramifications of the example Sasha mentions from her daughters’ class. Imagine if everyone behaved that way. No one would be allowed to or even feel the urge to discuss anything or hold any convictions that is not absolutely universal in the most totalitarian sense of the word imaginable.
If we bow down to the demands of political correctness we will eventually wake up to a reality that makes ‘Fahrenheit 451’ look like some mild form of thought control.
I don’t mean to be insensitive or ignorant, but I don’t understand (someone please explain it to me) why only African Americans can have ownership of the word “slave” – Yes, slavery in America is one (horrible) incarnation of slavery, but the word applies to other groups of people. And there are different forms of slavery. When I look at history, and then see this quote, I don’t see how it is offensive. What am I missing? I agree with Sasha – there seems to be a delight in being outraged.
Ryan – Could be! There are several editions of this book, and the one I had in front of me didn’t have the quote even though you can find it on Google Books. I found the equivalent section (it’s in an early chapter, and about the polarizing of the suffrage movement and the accompanying move from bipartisanship) and found a large bulk citation with like 10+ sources and assumed the one attributed to Pankhurst corresponded to the other edition. This may have been a leap on my part, but it’s not terribly uncommon practice to condense sections for subsequent editions of books like that, so I figured it was reasonable. I saw a letter by (or to?) Sylvia Pankhurst in that section, but not the one by Emmeline. If I had both/all editions this would be easier to clarify.
UBourgeois,
Thanks so much for helping us source this. I think you have enviable access to a major university library, and I appreciate you taking time to get your hands on the actual book in question.
I had ordered a beat-up edition for $3 because I wanted us to exercise due diligence about the attribution. But as you say, there is more than one edition of this book and there’s no guarantee that my $3 would have bought me any definitive answer. (So I cancelled the order) 🙂
The paragraph in question has two quotes. The first (“All my life I have looked to America with admiration as the home of liberty”) sounds like a formal line from a carefully written public speech — and I’d like to assume this is the line quoted in the 1912 Times-Union newspaper.
The second quote, as you know, is fragmentary. It’s not even a complete sentence. It’s been extracted from a remark that sounds to my ear like a more casual exchange — and I’d like to assume it was found in a box of private Parkhurst correspondence.
Whatever the source, we are losing sight of Sasha’s primary question: How can we brand someone a ‘racist’ on the basis of a fragment of a sentence, with no access to any of the contextual sentences that precede or follow it?
And let’s consider the idea that people speak in terms of (blunt, clumsy) hyperbole all the time, for verbal effect.
So unless Parkhurst was habitually spouting off about how she thought American Slavery was no big deal, then I can’t see how this exceeding obscure fragment of one sentence is enough to accuse Parkhurst of poo-poo-ing the horrors of 19th century slavery in the American South.
If hyperbolic words spoken in the flareups of strong feelings were meant to carry the weight of actual action, then half the tweeters on twitter would be busy fucking themselves right now.
“Moreover, the footnote to the quote cites another book called “In the Company of Educated Women,” but a quick search of that text (which has the subtitle: A History of Women and Higher Education in America) does not turn up the name Pankhurst, nor the quote itself.”
Just to further clarify: The quote that is being used to brand Pankhurst as racially insensitive is found in a book called “The Women’s Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s” (2014) by Christine Bolt.
But the quote itself does not receive a direct footnote attribution. Its source is not cited.
Instead, the entire paragraph — which pertains to several complex issues questioning the perceived militancy of the WSPU — is given one footnote.
That blanket footnote in the Bolt book points us to another book: “In the Company of Educated Women” (1985) by Barbara Miller Solomon. And as Sasha says, nowhere in the entire Solomon book does the name Pankhurst appear; and the quote isn’t there either.
I’ll have the Bolt book in my hands in a few days and we’ll let you know if any of this is any clearer from the actual text than the scraps that people have latched onto with their clickity-clack google-sleuth investigations.
[Edit: UBourgeois, your comment led me to an online screenshot of the full footnote citation, so I don’t need to have the Bolt book in hand in order to see her source.
Have you seen the Times-Union article from Dec 1912? Because it looks to me that the Times-Union citation refers back to THIS quote from Pankhurst:
There is then an adjacent Pankhurst source in the same footnote that simply says:
“Letter from Emmeline Pankhurst to Miss Eleanor Garrison, April 1912. … folder 1684, Box 57, Garrison Family Collection.”
To my eyes, it looks like this personal letter is the more likely citation for the more casually (carelessly) worded quote. I am basing this belief on the order of sentences in that paragraph as they match up with the two different sources in the footnote.
So, what we’re looking at here is NOT a speech given by Pankhurst. And it was NOT a formal declaration in any printed pamphlet from the the WSPU.
Nope. It looks like a line from a personal letter from one lady to another lady written in 1912, in private correspondence, and was certainly never intended by Pankhurst to represent her public stance on anything; but instead is nothing but an awkward sentence expressed in impassioned “rhetorical hyperbole” — as this post says.
It’s like searching through 55,000 pages of Hillary’s emails to find something she once uttered that could rub someone the wrong way. ]
And furthermore, anyone who has tried to link this quote to the book by Barbara Solomon is flat out wrong, because Pankhurst does not show up in that book at all.
I really hate comparative discrimination. Gays do not have the same struggles as blacks. Women do not have the same struggle as Jews. The struggles are different. One may allude to the struggle of others as a tenuous comparison. It is impossible to be a line for line analogy. It pains me to read one group getting offended when a comparison is made, and we are meant to take it literally. Do I think the T-Shirts are meant to be a slap in the face of African Americans? No. Do the T-Shirts reference a struggle one group had as being similar to another? A very slim reference.
Benutty – Sure, I wouldn’t say this makes Pankhurst evil beyond redemption or anything ridiculous like that, but at least call a spade a spade, and maybe be careful with uncritically holding up loaded quotes as inspirational slogans.
UBourgeois, I just wonder if Pankhurst’s quotes are being unfairly judged through a contemporary understanding of racism rather than the very different understanding of racism (probably at the time still called “racialism”) in her own time. In fact, a quick look at the Wikipedia entry on “Racism” reveals how in the early 1900s, “racism” was a relatively new term being thrown around. A general knowledge of early 20th century history should lead us to believe that expecting Pankhurst to have even a slightly more progressive way of phrasing that sentence would be expecting her to be 50+ years ahead of her time.
The first and third sections in my above comments are quotes from the article, and should be italicized. My b.
There can be no defense of it because we do not have the full context of the quote because it does not appear anywhere
So it just happens that I was in the library when I read this article, and a quick look-around pointed me first towards a book by Christine Bolt on suffrage movements in the US and Britain, and then from there to an article from the Times-Union from December 1912, called ‘Mrs. Pankhurst Talks on Suffrage.’ So she’s quoted there, at least, and I imagine a British newspaper or two could corroborate this.
Even if the offensive quote was true, and that back then Emmeline Pankhurst said women demanding the right to vote was more important than the plight of African slaves – it reveals ignorance but it doesn’t condemn her as a racist necessarily.
I dunno about this – how misaligned do your priorities need to be to say that centuries of chattel slavery and dehumanization “fall into insignificance” against almost anything? It may not be racism in the “Let’s go lynch somebody” manner, but it shows a profound lack of empathy and humanity in dealing with people of other races.
I don’t think this “controversy” is much comparable to the one over Selma, because they’re about fundamentally different things. The argument about Johnson had to do with historicity, and was largely based around on a fundamentally skewed view of Johnson popular among Selma’s critics vs the incidentally ungenerous one shown in Selma itself. This one is about truths of historical figures in the film (namely Pankhurst) that have simply gone unacknowledged, and how that lack of acknowledgement – justifiable or otherwise – has led to the weird and, frankly, baffling reappropriation of a quote that, in context, is less inspiring than unnerving. No one (or at least no one intelligent) is accusing Meryl Streep, somehow, of being racist, but there is a question of 1) who we hold up as progressive folk heroes despite problematic historical truth, and 2) how these problematic elements get glazed over to the point that someone could believe that an inherently loaded word like “slave” somehow exists in enough of a vacuum that it can be plastered on a shirt as part of a marketing scheme without any sort of pushback.
I dunno about this – how misaligned do your priorities need to be to say that centuries of chattel slavery and dehumanization “fall into insignificance” against almost anything? It may not be racism in the “Let’s go lynch somebody” manner, but it shows a profound lack of empathy and humanity in dealing with people of other races.
No, it doesn’t prove white supremacy or anything of the kind. It compares the plight of women to the plight of slavery. Worth noting, as we speak women and young girls are being kidnapped and enslaved by Isis — raped at the age of 12. In many other countries today women have no rights at all and are married off at the age of 9, sometimes 11. In many countries women have still have their clitoris removed to make them marriage material. It seems to me that women do have a right to complain about their plight – it’s nothing, you would say, or anyone would say, compared to slavery in the United States and elsewhere. But it’s not nothing. I would say about Pankhurst that you should not throw the baby out with the bathwater – just as many do with Abraham Lincoln by judging statements made then by today’s standards.