Cady vs. Douglass all over again?
BARRING some seismic scandal, unforeseen late entry (“Al Who?”), or unlikely surge by John Edwards, it is wholly inevitable that the race for the Democratic nomination will end next August in an epochal first.
Either Senator Barack Obama will be the first African-American or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major American political party. One of them will take the stage at Denver’s Pepsi Center, specked with confetti and soaked in history as a culminating figure of one of the great ideological movements of the last century — civil rights or women’s rights....
Breakthrough politics can be a zero-sum game, with distinct groups striving for a finite piece of the change pie. It brings to mind that the civil rights movement and the women’s movement have a long, complicated history dating back to abolitionism and the origins of modern feminism. While they have been philosophical allies, sharing goals and ideals, there have also been periodic collisions that could bespeak an inevitable friction as Barack v. Hillary moves forward and — potentially — in directions far less seemly than they have to date.
“The movements have been so deeply linked, and usually in harmony,” said Sara Evans, author of “Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left” and a historian at the University of Minnesota. “But there will always be points of tension, too,” Ms. Evans said, especially when the broad ideals that blacks and women have typically shared — in their fight for the vote, non-discrimination and economic equality — give way to the nitty-gritty of reaching consensus, setting policy, passing legislation and, in the case of elections, making choices.
One bitter case from the 19th century involved a split between the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the women’s rights’ pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton was herself a fervent abolitionist, and a close ally of Douglass, who later confined herself to the cause of women’s equality. These ideals would eventually clash, resulting in increasingly divisive rhetoric that reached a harsh climax after Stanton condemned the 15th amendment — which gave black men the right to vote but left out women of all races — as something that would establish “an aristocracy of sex on this continent.” She also alluded to the “lower orders” like Irish, blacks, Germans, Chinese.
Read entire article at NYT
Either Senator Barack Obama will be the first African-American or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major American political party. One of them will take the stage at Denver’s Pepsi Center, specked with confetti and soaked in history as a culminating figure of one of the great ideological movements of the last century — civil rights or women’s rights....
Breakthrough politics can be a zero-sum game, with distinct groups striving for a finite piece of the change pie. It brings to mind that the civil rights movement and the women’s movement have a long, complicated history dating back to abolitionism and the origins of modern feminism. While they have been philosophical allies, sharing goals and ideals, there have also been periodic collisions that could bespeak an inevitable friction as Barack v. Hillary moves forward and — potentially — in directions far less seemly than they have to date.
“The movements have been so deeply linked, and usually in harmony,” said Sara Evans, author of “Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left” and a historian at the University of Minnesota. “But there will always be points of tension, too,” Ms. Evans said, especially when the broad ideals that blacks and women have typically shared — in their fight for the vote, non-discrimination and economic equality — give way to the nitty-gritty of reaching consensus, setting policy, passing legislation and, in the case of elections, making choices.
One bitter case from the 19th century involved a split between the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the women’s rights’ pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton was herself a fervent abolitionist, and a close ally of Douglass, who later confined herself to the cause of women’s equality. These ideals would eventually clash, resulting in increasingly divisive rhetoric that reached a harsh climax after Stanton condemned the 15th amendment — which gave black men the right to vote but left out women of all races — as something that would establish “an aristocracy of sex on this continent.” She also alluded to the “lower orders” like Irish, blacks, Germans, Chinese.