A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning History Book 1)

by Michael Bronski

While both the labor and social purity groups were abolitionist, there were disagreements on race politics. Many people in the social purity movement were wedded to a model of racial purity that placed the “white race” above all others. They imagined the dangers of race and sex to be strikingly similar. Often they linked nonwhite races to sexual impurity and immoral sexual behaviors, including unrestrained sexual desire, rape, and “unspeakable acts” (a euphemism for same-sex sexual activity). Racial purity was intrinsic to their quest for purifying American culture and ensuring their class status. M. Carey Thomas—who was passionately involved with women her entire adult life and who, as president of Bryn Mawr, profoundly shaped women’s education in the United States—believed in white racial superiority. She refused to allow any Jewish faculty members at the school and frequently questioned the ability of nonwhite people to be educated. Frances Willard, also involved in passionate female-female relationships, voiced sentiments indicative of social purity politics in an 1890 newspaper column about temperance, Northern immigration, and race in the South: I think we have wronged the South, though we did not mean to do so. The reason was, in part, that we had irreparably wronged ourselves by putting no safeguard on the ballot-box at the North that would sift out alien illiterates. They rule our cities to-day; the saloon is their palace, and the toddy stick their sceptre. It is ...