Osame Osayande’s Reviews > Women, Race & Class > Status Update

Encouraged and inspired by ever loving memories of you

For suffragists and clubwomen alike, Black women were simply expendable entities when it came time to woo Southern support with a white complexion.

Black women had been more than willing to contribute those "clear powers of observation and judgement" toward the creation of a multiracial movement for women's political rights. But at every turn, they were betrayed, spurned and rejected by the leaders of the lily-white woman suffrage movement.

While their men's sexist behavior definitely needed to be challenged, the real enemy-their common enemy-was the boss, the capitalist, or whoever was responsible for the miserable wages and unbearable working conditions and for racist and sexist discrimination on the job.

Anthony's staunchly feminist position was also a staunch reflection of bourgeois ideology. And it was probably because of the ideology's blinding powers that she failed to realize that working-class women and Black women alike were fundamentally linked to their men by the class exploitation and racist oppression which did not discriminate between the sexes.

Stanton insisted that the exclusion from the NLU proved "….. what the Revolution has said again and again, that the worst enemies of Woman Suffrage will ever be the laboring classes of men.