Click on title to link to "Women and Revolution" article ("Spartacist", Spring 2006) on "The Russian Revolution And The Emancipation Of Women".
March is Women's History Month
The following article was originally published in Women and Revolution, Summer 1974 and may be of more than historical interest to the radical public.
Women, Culture and Class Society, Helen Cantor
At first glance, it would appear that the problems of culture and women's contributions to it are somewhat removed from the immediate tasks of building a revolutionary party of the proletariat, and in a sense, these questions are. The struggle for women's creative and full participation in all aspects of society seems of concern only to the educated women of the middle class. Of what concern is this struggle to revolutionists?
The problem of culture and gaining access to it is a fundamental one for the proletariat. As Trotsky wrote: "The proletariat is forced to take power before it has appropriated the fundamental elements of bourgeois culture; it is forced to overthrow bourgeois society by revolutionary violence for the very reason that society does not allow it access to culture" (Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution).
Ever since the beginning of human development the iron necessity to survive has usually necessitated a division between hunting and child-rearing tasks. While this original division did not result in women's present oppression, the development of civilization, i.e., class society, did, by excluding women from many areas of social labor. Women have historically been kept pregnant most of their lives and, under advanced capitalism, isolated in individual households and thus impeded from attaining full expression of their creativity and social productivity. It is only comparatively recently (in the last 200 years) with the development of capitalism, that significant numbers of women (and at first only those of the upper classes) even learned to read or were allowed to attend school.
As Marxists, we are interested in human culture— our fundamental aim is to create a society in which all humanity, unimpeded by material scarcity, can develop its creative abilities freely and to the utmost.
There is a great deal of vulgar materialism and ignorance on the left regarding the relation of culture to the proletariat, due in part to the atrocities of "socialist realism" perpetrated by the Stalinists, including the Maoist variety. "Workerist" philistines glorify the lack of culture in the working class, justifying this by defining all standards of culture as inherently bourgeois. These currents are reflected within women's organizations, too, as shown recently by attempts to create a "women's culture" in opposition to "male-dominated" culture.
"Cultural feminism" has become a trend in what is left of the now largely dissipated outburst of feminist activity of the late 1960's. The women's movement left few organizations in its wake other than a string of women's studies departments on campuses across the country, and small clumps of women's schools or centers (like the Chicago Women's Liberation Union school), most of whose activities center around do-it-yourself gynecology, Volkswagen repair or some variant of "women's culture," such as women's rock and roll bands, poetry readings, paintings or displays of women's crafts. This strain of "cultural feminism" is also evident in recent publications of anthologies of women poets, journals (like Aphra or The Amazon Quarterly devoted to lesbian culture, or The Feminist Art Journal) and endless articles in almost all women's papers (and some liberal papers, like the
Village Voice and the New York Review of Books) on women artists, poets, etc.
The worldview of these cultural feminists is often shared by more political "socialist feminists" and even by many of the ex-New Left Maoists, and is tailed uncritically by groups like the SWP in precisely the same way that they tail black nationalism. To this worldview we counterpose a Marxist materialist understanding of the basis of woman's oppression and of culture in general. In order to seek to create a truly human culture, as Marx said, we must create the conditions in which humanity can, for the first time, make its own history.
Some Currents of Feminism Today
The "cultural feminists" propound several somewhat contradictory theories. First, there are the liberal academics, who argue that there really are great women artists, scientists, leaders, and so on, but that' they have been left out of history, so we don't know about them. This is the "herstory" liner-"write women back into history." As if wiping out centuries of oppression were merely a matter of altering a few textbooks.' "Teach the real contributions women have made in the past," they demand. This argument in effect denies the reality of women's oppression, because it denies that that oppression had any particular effect on women.
Another variant on the "herstory" concept is that the reason nobody noticed all this womanly creative activity was because all culture is male culture and thus the female aspects of creativity were ignored or neglected—like making quilts or weaving, for example (off our backs has had several culture pull-outs on quilt-making). Women's art must be judged by different standards than that of men, advocates of this position say. Women's crafts were not seen as great art simply because women did them—presumably if men had made the quilts they would be displayed in the museums along with the Rembrandts and Greek sculptures.
More radical feminists call for the creation of an entirely separate "women's culture" because, given male dominance, it is supposedly impossible for women to create anything except by withdrawing, creating "their own space." This position asserts that women are inherently different from men, that their sexual identity is the most important thing about them and will inevitably (or should inevitably) determine their social behavior, ideas, creative expression and so on. This argument is quite close to that of the fake anthropologists like Lionel Tiger, who argues in Men in Groups that because of the original biological functions of men as hunters and women as child-raisers,-they have inherent and instinctual responses to life, see the world differently, and are thus naturally assigned to their present social roles (women aren't good at politics, men are more aggressive).
Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sex, goes somewhat further than the need for a separate women's culture. For her, culture, in the sense of aesthetics and art, is the expression of women's sexual nature. She writes:
"We have noted how those few women directly creating culture have gravitated to disciplines within the Aesthetic Mode. There is a good reason for this: the aesthetic response corresponds with 'female' behavior. The same terminology can be applied to either: subjective, intuitive, introverted, wishful, dreamy or fantastic, concerned with the subconscious.... Correspondingly, the technological response is the masculine response: objective, logical, extroverted, realistic, concerned with the conscious mind...."
—Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex
For Firestone, the sexual division of humanity is the basis from which class divisions grew and from which the division between science and art (objective vs. subjective) developed as well. This division seems. particularly artificial and false, however, when it is noted that men have had less trouble in assuming the "feminine aesthetic" mode—most of the great novelists, poets, artists, etc., have after all been men. Why cannot women therefore equally easily assume the "masculine technological" model?
The most developed expression of "women's culture" (at least in the visual arts) is probably the male-exclusionist Womanhouse arts center created by Judy Chicago in California. Judy Chicago, an artist, has developed the theory that women's art has historically shown a preoccupation with womb-like shapes; 'holes, rounded organic forms (for example Georgia O'Keefe's enlarged flower parts)—the "dark inner space" of woman. Off our backs reviewed a women's art show in New York last November in an article called "another cuntree [sic]—at last a mainstream women's art movement," which enthused over the proliferation of gigantic female organs, erotic art, fruit-flower fertility themes, etc., and projected from these the creation of "a mainstream female art movement," whose emphasis was on woman's sexuality. This vision of the liberated creative woman as a flower/fruit/fecund moon-goddess/earth mother would be funny (in an intimidating kind of way), were it not the very same image of woman that has arisen as a result of her oppression and been used to "keep her in her place," creating with her womb, not her mind—the intuitive, irrational instinctive mother to be kept out of the 'light of day" of men's politics, creativity, social labor.
"Her story"
Obviously, these two beliefs—that women have made contributions but been unrecognized and that women are fundamentally different from men—are somewhat contradictory. The first asserts that women can entirely transcend their oppression in class society and rise above its effects to create an art which is "just as good" as "men's" art, the other that women are deep down different from men and therefore must reject all previous human achievement as "male culture" and create their own exclusionary culture and society. We deny both these assertions.
The "herstory" question is dealt with in an interesting and thoughtful article by Linda Nochlin (an art historian) called "Why Are There No Great Women Artists?" (reprinted in Art News, January 1971). This article has created much controversy within the women's movement, not only because of its position on women, but also for its analysis of what art is.
Of course, one's immediate response to the question is a sharp reaction against the natural male chauvinist answer, "Women aren't great artists because they are incapable of it—all they can do is -make babies." But to say that women are potentially equally capable of true creativity is not the same thing as attempting to prove that they are in fact creative, as Nochlin points out. The truth is that women have not participated fully in the creation and development of human culture, because they have been excluded from social production and kept isolated in private occupations of child-rearing and housekeeping, tasks which were historically necessary and from which women could not escape until the development of modern capitalism which provided the technology and productive resources such that this primitive division of. labor was no longer necessary.
There have been exceptions to this general truth, of course, but they are almost exclusively from the middle and upper classes. To the extent that a few women have been able to be creative, it has been primarily in the arts, in writing novels, poetry and in painting, for instance. One could ask, "Why have there been no great women architects, bridge-builders, scientists, generals?" equally validly. The reason women have contributed in the arts is not due to some "feminine aesthetic" but because these occupations, being essentially individual and private, were more accessible.
But even within the arts, women have not been able to contribute as much as men. Why? As Nochlin puts it:
"... [conditions in the arts are] stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all who do not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle-class or above, males. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education...."
The production of great art, as Nochlin points out, is not "the direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience. the language of art is neither a sob story or a hoarse, confidential whisper "but has rather involved a self-consistent language of form, teaching, building on the experience of past generations of artists, long apprenticeships and intense and lengthy periods of personal experimentation. Women have in most cases been denied access to these artistic necessities. For example, prior to the twentieth century, women were unable to study the live nude, which was absolutely necessary to an artist's education, and were then accused of being incapable of understanding the male form. Upper-class "ladies" were at most encouraged to paint flowers on velvet or China, and were then accused of being unable to develop large, heroic sculptural forms. Almost all women artists up to the end of the 19th century were either the daughters of artist fathers or fathers sympathetic to their intellectual development; or else were associated with a more dominant male artistic personality (for example, Rosa Bonheur, Victorian painter of animals; Maria Robusti, daughter of Tintoretto, Lavinia Fontana, Renaissance painter; Mary Cassatt, associated with Degas).
To face clearly the fact that only a tiny percentage of privileged women, in exceptional circumstances, have succeeded in becoming successful artists or scientists or whatever they wish is not to despair. Instead of denying the reality of women's oppression, we recognize how this oppression came about and we see a road to end it in the real world through action, instead of retreating to wishful dreaming and academic pursuit of the alleged unappreciated great women geniuses of the past.
Women's Studies and Idealism
The current proliferation of women's studies departments and women's schools implies an underlying philosophy of idealism, which ignores both the actuality and historic necessity of women's oppression and therefore refuses to understand how this oppression must be finally overcome.
Marx asserted that inequality and oppression are historically necessary and can be overcome only through the total development of society, centering on the raising of the productive forces. In Theories of Surplus Value he writes, "... at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even 'classes...." and in The German Ideology he insists that "in general people cannot ‘be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. 'Liberation' is an historical and not a mental act...."
But for the women's studies departments, liberation is "a mental act." This belief is characteristic of educated petty-bourgeois academics seeking" to rise above the. uncomfortable harsh realities of class society because they are caught in the middle. On the one hand, they sympathize with the sad plight of the poor, yet still admire the resourcefulness and cunning (and presumably superior intelligence) of the capitalist and hope that maybe they too will be like him someday. Knowledge is power for these dreamers, because to them it seems that ideas rule the world and that if women can only learn the truth about themselves, this will somehow automatically free them.
"Women's Culture"
Those who advocate the creation (or announce the existence) of a separate women's culture also share this idealism, in that they believe it is possible to withdraw from an oppressive society and thus escape its effects. They are either extremely naive, cynically selfish or simply opportunist in advocating this for the mass of women, because it is possible for only a few privileged women with a sufficient financial base to create a relatively pleasant and isolated personal milieu, in which they can concentrate on discovering what their "true sexual essence" may be.
What the "true nature" of men and women is-whether or not men and women have different social needs and expectations because of their biological differences-r-is a question which cannot be answered objectively under the hideously deforming pressures o»f class society.
Attempts to create a separate women's culture therefore tend to end up imitating or using the most extreme caricatures of womanhood—like the fruit/ flower/moon goddess. The attempt to discover a separate "woman's aesthetic" in art of the past, too, is rather difficult. It is obvious that the work of artists within a particular period or school (Baroque, Rococo, Impressionism, German Expressionism, Cubism, etc.)
resembles that of others in the same school far more that the work of individual men and women within each particular school differs.
Stalinism and Art
It's not accidental that some of the proponents of a women's culture reprint Stalinist works or admire Mao's "proletarian" art theories (see for example the paper Women and Art, Summer/Fall, 1972, and its supplement on "Art and Society" devoted entirely to works by Stalinist art historians). The caricatures of "womanhood" (either the eternally strong or eternally suffering woman) are necessary to their art in the same way that caricatures of the proletariat and bourgeoisie are necessary for Stalinist propaganda. They need very obvious symbols to mark their work as clearly identifying itself with a particular viewpoint, and also, in their condescending opinion, in order to be immediately understood by the masses. This "socialist" ^art which requires "realism" as its medium drags all art down to the- level of crude propaganda and clichés of brawny-armed workers, factory chimneys, red flags, etc. Likewise, the cultural feminists need to show "female" symbolism—and in this society no other symbols are available which would be immediately understood by "the masses" except sexual imagery, traditional images of womanhood, round, organic, "warm-tender" qualities, etc.
Many feminist artists are quite hostile to abstract art because it doesn't fit their concept of art as propaganda. It's not immediately obvious what the ideological viewpoint is, or even in fact whether a man or woman painted it.' Thus such work must be under constant suspicion as not being "correct." This vulgarity has nothing in common with what art is, which is not propaganda (not the "hoarse whispered confession" or "sob story"), but rather an attempt to extend consciousness, to break new ground, and is therefore often difficult to understand at first.
Women artists have begged to be judged by the same standards as men, for there is one standard in art. Different standards in this case, as in all other areas, only mean disguised contempt. As Virginia Woolf wrote, "It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance, to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman" (A Room of One's Own). The question of standards in art is important. As Trotsky said, "proletarian art must not be second-class art" (Literature and Revolution)—the proletarian revolution will lay the basis for creating a culture which must build on (and will eventually supersede the best of all past cultures.
Male Chauvinism
But isn't the concept of culture being used in too broad a sense? What about male chauvinism? Isn't there, after all, such a thing as "bourgeois culture" which can poison the minds of the workers? The uprooting of bourgeois ideology requires not a purge of bourgeois art, a la the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," but the elimination of the material conditions (the repressive nuclear family, social inequality, unequal access to education and jobs, absorption in child-raising and housework, etc.) which have given rise to male-chauvinist ideology. If these conditions are changed, reflections of this change will ultimately appear in literature and art. That is the only way to thoroughly and forever abolish false conceptions of reality. As Orwell said about Salvador Dali (and he loathed Dali, believing him to be a truly sick individual who spread fantasies of necrophilia), it is a dubious policy to ban much of anything, particularly in the fields of art or science. Lenin continually warned comrades not to become too self-assured, too self-righteous, because Marxism is a science of economic and political life which applies only indirectly to other disciplines. Essentially Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky all insisted on the autonomy of art.
Of course there is a dominant "bourgeois culture." But it is based on the entire accumulated experiences of all human societies since the beginning of man. Thus it would be more accurate to speak of "human culture in a bourgeois epoch," for it is this entire range of human culture which the bourgeoisie has taken as its exclusive possession and which the proletariat must conquer. Socialist society must and will base itself upon this entire accumulated experience.
Socialist Humanity
Since the beginning of class society the social roles of men and women have never been equal—that is the goal of communist society. Until such a society is achieved, it is almost impossible to untangle the results of social training and education, which reflect the inequalities of class society, from what may possibly be real differences among peoples, sexes, etc. We are justly suspicious of the uses to which research in "social sciences" is put in capitalist society. As Trotsky said in a speech to a scientific gathering in Russia in 1925:
". .the greater the trust of socialism devoted to direct study of nature, the greater is its initial distrust in approaching those sciences and pseudo-sciences which are linked closely to the structure of human society, its economic institutions, its state, laws, ethics, etc."
—"Dialectical Materialism and Science” in Problems of Everyday Life
Much of these "pseudo-sciences" end up simply justifying the status quo, i.e., capitalism with its attendant evils, because they begin with the assumption of some kind of "eternal human nature" which produces society, and thus that's the way it has to be, forever and ever." Further, all past alleged differences between races and sexes have at one time or another been used by reactionaries as an ideological excuse for the purpose of justifying the oppression of (or even seeking to destroy) the supposedly "inferior" grouping.
But suppose some real aptitudinal differences do exist between men and women and could be proven? Our response would be "so what?" A free society must require absolute equality of opportunity and access to all areas of human life and culture. A proletarian state developing toward communism (the classless society) will have no reason to fear investigation and exploration of all potential differences, because our society will be based upon the absolute equality and freedom of all humanity, regardless of any such differences.
As Isaac Deutscher said at a Socialist Scholars Conference on the subject of "socialist man":
"We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man's making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex, and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labor movement have taken on.
"Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these. And if his nature remains aggressive, his society will give him immeasurably greater and more varied opportunities than bourgeois man has for sublimating his instinctual drives and turning them to creative uses.... The average member of socialist society may yet rise, as Trotsky anticipated, to the stature of Aristotle, Goethe, Marx.... And we assume that 'above these heights new peaks will rise.' We do not see in socialist man evolution's last and perfect product, or the end of history, but in a sense only the beginning of history." •
Showing posts with label WOMEN'S STRUGGLES. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WOMEN'S STRUGGLES. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Monday, March 03, 2008
Women's History Month-Witchcraft and Statecraft
March is Women's History Month
The following is an article from the journal Women and Revolution, Autumn 1974. This is a subject that has always interested me as a part of the question of the transformation from feudalism to early capitalism. Obviously the subject has received more updated coverage but the political points in the article are relevant to any such study. Also check the bibliography for a decent start to any scholarly interest on the subject.
Witchcraft and Statecraft: A Materialist Analysis of the European Witch Persecutions by D.L.Reissner, Women and Revolution, Autumn 1974
Several years have elapsed since the heyday of feminist organizations with names like W.I.T.C.H. (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and Red Witch, but many feminists have continued to identify themselves with witches, as is attested to by several recently published articles, including "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers" by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English and "What Were Those Witches Really Brewing?", by Andrea Dworkin which appeared in the April issue of Ms. This identification rests apparently on the feminists' view of witches as early prototypes of the liberated woman, although a little research of witch practices could seriously weaken this assumption. For example, each coven (local organization) of twelve witches was presided over by a man who played the role of the Devil, and it was standard practice at sabbats (witches' meetings) that each witch showed her respect to him by kissing his posterior and penis; this was known as the "kiss of shame." Furthermore, no sabbat was complete until the "Devil" had engaged in sexual intercourse with all 12 witches.
It is not surprising that the history of European witchcraft and witch persecutions (the New England witch trials, which occurred on a relatively small scale and in a different social context at the very end of the European witch craze, must be considered separately) should evoke great interest among people concerned with women's liberation, because it is a segment of the history of the oppression of women which is virtually unparalleled in its scope, duration and intensity. As Marxists, however, we approach this history in a way which is different both from the approach of feminists and from that of most other bourgeois historians whose analyses tend to be psychological, anthropological or merely romantic.
The European witch craze must be viewed as one component in the complex economic, social and political dynamic which transformed European civilization in the period between the 13th and 17th centuries and which included the rise of capitalism and the emergence of Protestantism. Of particular significance to an understanding of the witch craze was the consolidation of modern territorial nation-states during this period, for, as this article will seek to show, the witch craze was in the first instance an attempt to deal with the problem of socially inassimilable peoples in the face of this national consolidation.
Witches Have Not Always Been Persecuted
Ever since the 18th century there has been a tendency to regard European history from the Renaissance onward as inevitably progressive. Yet the same era which witnessed the flowering of Renaissance culture also produced the witch craze—a mania of terror and repression unknown in the so-called "Dark" Ages. Estimates vary, but the most conservative concede that at least 30,000 persons lost their lives as witches during this time—85 percent of them women.
Now that belief in the efficacy of witchcraft has become less, fashionable in this part of the world, there is a tendency to dismiss it as nothing more than a delusion of a few unbalanced minds, but witch practices have existed since ancient times and among all peoples. In fact, one of the most striking aspects of witchcraft is the uniformity of its practice in widely separated countries and civilizations. In India, just as in England, the cat is believed to be the witch's familiar, and in ancient Italy the evil eye was dreaded as it is in many parts of Africa today and was guarded against by the same symbol.
When religions establish themselves in new territories, the god or gods of the old religion become the devils (the word "devil," derived from the same root
as "divine," means "little god") of the new. Then fortune-telling, the special province of the witch or wise woman, which had been called prophecy when it
had been done in the name of the established religion, is designated as witchcraft. And so it was when Christianity superseded the older totemic cults of
Western Europe—cults which had honored female sexuality as the embodiment of the regenerative power of nature.
While the Church was formally opposed to these relics of paganism which continued to exist alongside Christianity, it found it politic, given their broad popular appeal, to accommodate itself to them in practice or even to co-opt them. In fact when in 1257 the Dominican Order, which had been established to combat the Albigensian and Vaudois heresies, uncovered witch practices in Southern France and requested that Pope Alexander DC grant it jurisdiction over witches as well as heretics, he refused. Not for another 200 years were the Dominicans to have their way unobstructed by the Catholic Church.
The Church based its position on the Canon Episcopi, a document dating back to the ninth century at least, which attempted to minimize the importance of witch practices not through persecution—Charlemagne had declared the burning of witches a capital crime as early as 785 AJD.—but through denying the very existence of witches and ridiculing belief in them:
"Some -wicked women, reverting to Satan, and seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess that they ride at night with Diana on certain beasts, with an innumerable company of women, passing over immense distances, obeying her command as their mistress, and evoked by her on ‘certain nights.... Therefore priests everywhere should preach that they know this to be false, and that such phantasms are sent by the Evil Spirit, who deludes them in dreams. Who is there who is not led out of himself in dreams, seeing much in sleeping that he never saw in waking? And who is such a fool that he believes that to happen in the body which is done only in the spirit?"
As late as the 12th century, John of Salisbury continued to dismiss the idea of the witches' sabbat as a fabulous dream. Yet this skeptical toleration was soon to give way to the hysteria of the witch craze, and woe to the occasional skeptic then, for he too would rapidly fall under suspicion.
The horror of the persecutions—the carefully refined tortures, the sexual degradation, the unspeakable anguish which wrung from the victims accusations against their friends, spouses and children—these are well documented and need not be elaborated here. Suffice it to say that at the height of the witch craze the intensity of the persecutions was such that in at least two villages in Germany only one woman was left alive.
Pessimism 0f Protestantism?
Given the fact that witchcraft had existed more or less undisturbed since ancient times, an analysis of the witch persecutions turns upon the answer to the question of why they erupted at the particular moment which they did.
The historical context in which the craze reached its height was one of unprecedented social upheaval. This was the period of the Hundred Years' War, the
rise of capitalism, the consolidation of nation-states, the Black Death, the discovery of the' New World, the Protestant Reformation and a series of religious,
wars so devastating that some historians contend that the European economy has not yet recovered from them. Such periods of social disturbance always give
rise to increased superstitions and unorthodox beliefs, and several students of the witch craze, including Jules Michelet and Julio Caro Baroja, claim that it grew out of the catastrophes of the 14th century and the widespread pessimism which these
catastrophes engendered.
Michelet points, out that while witchcraft had been practiced for hundreds of years, certain of its aspects, including the pact with the devil, did not appear before the 14th century. The reason for this, he argues, is that before this times people had not been sufficiently desperate to conceive of such a thing, but with the coming of an age in which the peasant was for the first time' required to pay quit-rents (rents paid in lieu of obligatory feudal services) and taxes in money, the concept of a pact with the devil became extremely attractive. Says Michelet:
"The pact required an age in which Hell itself appeared as a shelter, an asylum, a relief, as contrasted with the Hell of this world."
But while belief in witchcraft within primitive and modern societies 'alike increases as a result of social catastrophe and pessimism, this is clearly inadequate as the sole explanation for 400 years of terror. As the historian H.R. Trevor-Roper points out, the craze gathered force before either the Black Death or the Hundred Years' War had begun and-continued for two centuries after they were over—centuries marked by general recovery and expansion.
Another explanation often put forward for the outbreak of witch persecutions in this period is that they were a peculiarly Protestant phenomenon and arose therefore as a result of the Protestant Reformation.
It is true that both Luther and Calvin professed belief in witches and declared that they should be burned, and it is also true that the pattern of the witch persecutions coincided closely with the course of the religious wars, both on the Continent and in Britain, but there is no more basis for linking the craze with Protestantism than with Catholicism. It was in fact a product of the conflict between them. The Protestants carried the witch craze to the countries which they conquered for the Reformation while the Catholic Jesuits introduced it equally into the countries which they reconquered for Rome, including Bavaria, the Rhineland, Flanders and Poland. Toulouse, the capital of the witch burners, was a great center of Catholic orthodoxy. It is also noteworthy that it was the Protestant rather than the Catholic countries which took the lead in bringing the witch craze to a halt. By 1700 England and Holland had long since abandoned the persecution of witches on a large scale while the Catholic prince-bishops of Germany were still 'burning them by the score.
Since Protestants supposedly rejected all doctrine which the corrupt papacy had added to the Bible and the writings of the early Church Fathers, they should have logically rejected the dendrology of the Inquisition as well. In fact, this point was raised repeatedly by isolated Protestant critics, but without effect. Although they frequently burned Catholics as witches, the Protestant witch hunters continued to refer approvingly to the Dominican handbook of the witch craze, the Malleus Malificarum, Catholic inquisitors returned the compliment by citing Protestant authorities on the subject such as Erastus and Daneau. In other words, although the witch persecutions waxed and waned in direct proportion to the degree of religious conflict in each area, they were not fundamentally the product of doctrinal differences, but rather, as Trevor-Roper convincingly argues, of social differences and specifically of the demand for social assimilation which became acute in this period.
In those instances where there wars no such demand, there were no witch persecutions. For example, at the height of the witch craze, the Swedish Lutherans discovered that the Lapps in the territory they governed were imbued with witch beliefs. The Lutheran Church took no action in this case. Since there was no desire to socially integrate the Lapp dissenters, there was likewise no compulsion to persecute them for their witch practices.
The link between the witch persecutions and the question of social assimilation is apparent from the very beginning. When the Dominicans made their discovery of witchcraft in 1257 in" the "dark corners" of Europe, i.e., the Alps and the Pyrenees, they were disturbed not by the old rural superstitions per se, which were considered harmless enough, but by the fact that they were practiced by the people of a mountain civilization which appeared quite alien to the civilization of the plains—socially, culturally, economically and probably racially. These were the people who had retreated to the hinterlands of Europe at an early period. Feudalism had never penetrated this area in more than a superficial way, and neither had Christianity. Unlike the civilization of the plains, which was based on the cultivation of the land and the institution of the manor, the civilization of the mountains was pastoral and individualistic. The discovery of Witchcraft among these people must have come as no surprise to the Dominicans, yet the same practices which had been tolerated in the feudal towns and villages appeared far more ominous when viewed across an unbridgeable social chasm. The Dominicans reacted in a novel and unexpected way: they attempted to persecute the witches as heretics.
As we have seen, the papacy refused to support such persecutions at this time, but as the demand for social homogeneity became more urgent, the Dominican crusade became the wave of the future.
Witchcraft and Statecraft
The medieval concept of society had been based on an ideal of universality embodied in the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. Despite this ideal, however, medieval political, judicial and economic institutions, operating within the confines of an agrarian economy, were almost invariably local. During the 12th and 13th centuries, however, the economic conditions which had made such local autonomy inevitable began to disappear. The revival of commerce and the growth of cities increased the circulation of money and the expansion of trade to the point at which local autonomy became financially impractical. During the 14th and 15th centuries, the feudal suzerainties of local lords were gradually transformed into absolute monarchies. Behind this enormous change lay the power of; a new social class—the growing class of capitalist entrepreneurs whose business needs had outgrown feudal social institutions and who now demanded the larger sphere of operation which only a territorial state could provide.
The welding of a nation-state—the creation of a "people" with a sense of common identity—demanded social homogeneity, including religious homogeneity. To be Spanish meant to be Catholic; to be English, Anglican. Moreover, religious homogeneity was important to emerging rulers not only because it enabled them to bind their subjects more closely and to disguise territorial aggression as holy war, but also because it enabled them to control their subjects much more effectively. The established church was in each locality an arm of the state apparatus. To the extent that there were citizens beyond its reach, they represented a threat to the newly established order.
Thus the period of the witch craze is also the period in which the Jews and Moors were expelled from Spain, the Protestants were expelled from France, the Puritans were hounded out of England and the Inquisition was at the height of its power. The conjuncture of these persecutions is hardly coincidental. They are all, at least in part, attempts to deal with the problem of socially inassimilable peoples during the ‘period of the consolidation of European nation-states. The witch craze cannot be understood apart from this larger social movement of which it was an aspect. This understanding, incidentally, was not lost on the authorities of the time, who not infrequently launched campaigns of persecution against all the stereotypes of unassimilability in their particular areas; for instance, Protestants, Jews and witches in Trier.
"Most Women are Witches"
The one aspect of the witch persecutions which did distinguish them from all other persecutions of the period was that their victims were overwhelmingly women, particularly older women between 50 and 70 years of age and very often women who were unusually independent in one way or another—widows, spinsters, midwives. Not that men were exempt from persecution, but as Jacob Sprenger, co-author of the Malleus Malificahan, wrote: "We should speak of the Heresy of the Sorceresses, not of the Sorcerers, for the latter are of small account."
The Judaeo-Christian tradition had long rationalized the social oppression of women by designating them as weak and sinful and easily tempted by the devil. The Jewish Talmud makes this clear by its statement, "Women are naturally inclined to witchcraft," and "The more women there are, the more witchcraft there will be," and again, "Most women are witches."
Christianity postulated that men were protected from becoming witches not only by virtue of their superior intellect and faith, but also because Jesus Christ had died, as it said in the Malleus, "to preserve1 the male sex from so great a crime."
Women were regarded as particularly prone to diabolical temptation not merely because they were deemed intellectually and spiritually inferior to men, but also and especially because they were believed to be sexually insatiable. La the Malleus it is woman's carnality which is offered as the ultimate proof of her predisposition to witchcraft: "All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable."
It was only this view of women which made the endless confessions of seduction by the devil plausible, for they corroborated the popular conception of the nature of female sexuality.
But this long-standing attitude does not in itself explain the outbreak of bitter misogynism which has been observed in this period. Recently published demographic findings, as historian Erik Midlefort has noted, suggest the basis for a more substantial explanation.
The European Marriage Pattern
Demographer John Hajnal has demonstrated that one of the most profound changes that Europe has ever experienced dates roughly from the 15th or 16th centuries. This is the appearance of the "European marriage pattern"—a pattern characterized by relatively late marriage and by large proportions of people who never marry. The percentage of these single people rose in this period from about five percent of the population to 15 or 20 percent.
It was this shift toward later marriage which laid the basis for the nuclear family, since in societies where there is little control over conception the age of partners at marriage is one of the most important variables bearing upon the reproduction rate. It also facilitated the Industrial Revolution by raising the average income and making it possible for savings to be devoted to improving capital assets rather than supporting population growth. Of immediate importance was the fact that for the first time in European history there was a very large percentage of unmarried women, whose ranks were further augmented by widows created by the frequent wars, plagues and emigration. (With regard to the plague, it is noteworthy that in some areas it was fatal for up to ten times as many men as women in the population, possibly because women were more bound to the home and thus less exposed to contagion.) At the same time convents, once the sole refuge of spinsters, were being dismantled in Protestant countries, and even in Catholic countries they were on the. decline.
In a society which was totally patriarchal and family-centered and which provided no social role for women outside the family, the growing numbers of single women were regarded as at least peculiar and possibly seditious, especially after the death of
their fathers removed them from patriarchal control entirely. And in fact widows and spinsters were accused of witchcraft in numbers far out of proportion to their representation in society. Of course, the fact that these women were unprotected made them more vulnerable to attack, but the essential point to be made is that it was the unprecedented existence of large numbers of women outside the protection of the family which brought them under suspicion in the first place. Aside from spinsters and widows, the women who came under attack for witchcraft most often were lay medical practitioners of one sort or another, particularly midwives. As the Malleus says:
"... as penitent witches have often told to us and to others, saying: No one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than midwives. For when they do not kill children, as if for some other purpose they take them out of the room and, raising them up in the air, offer them to devils."
Country medicine, the medicine of the poor, was often, although by no means exclusively, practiced by women, and witches were often "accused" of having the power to heal. In fact, they-did develop herbal remedies, some of which are still in use. It has also been discovered that the ointment with which they anointed themselves before "flying" to the sabbats contained hallucinogenic properties such that the feeling of "flying might indeed ensue.
Feminists Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have made the interesting point that the rising European medical profession played an active role in suppressing all lay competition during this period, including the medicine of the "white" (good) witches, although to consider this the fundamental basis of the European witch craze is superficial, and to assert, as they do, that male and female healers were on opposite sides of a class struggle because women served the "people" while men served the ruling class is crude and inaccurate.
The Witch Craze Burns Out
In his Dictionnalre Philosophise written in 1764, Voltaire quipped:
"It is a great pity that there are no longer any persons possessed by the Devil, or magicians, or astrologers, or genii. One cannot conceive how useful all these
mysteries were a hundred years ago. In those days, the nobility lived in castles. The winter evenings were long and everyone would have died of boredom if these
noble entertainments had not been available.... Every village had its own sorcerer and witch; every prince his astrologer; all the ladies had their fortunes told;
those possessed by the Devil wandered all over the place; everyone wanted to know who had seen the Devil or who was going to see him; and all this provided an
endless topic of conversation which kept everyone in suspense. Nowadays we play insipid card games and have lost a lot by losing our illusions."
Voltaire could afford to joke for he had the good fortune to live at a time, when such jokes no longer led inescapably to the Inquisition and the stake. The
witch craze, along with other mass-forms of fanatical religious persecution, began to dissolve in both Protestant and Catholic countries in Western Europe in the mid-17th century. By this time, the wars of religion were coming to an end, territorial nation-states were more securely consolidated and the "alien" social groups within them had been for the most part either assimilated, exterminated or expelled.
Furthermore, witch beliefs seemed far less credible, among certain groups at least, during the age of science and skepticism which the commercial revolution had ushered in. The assumption that a neighbor's malice could cause physical harm had seemed more likely in a subsistence-level village where social cooperation was a vital necessity than it did in the 17th century when increased economic individualism and greater social mobility were severing the older collective ties.
Although occasional witch persecutions continued until the 1850's, and although witchcraft long remained a criminal offense in many countries, including England where it was not removed from the statute books until 22 June 1951, by the beginning of the 18th century the witch craze was unmistakably dead. It would be some time, however, before cosmopolitan wits such as Voltaire began to consider the subject amusing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buroja, Julio Caro. The World of the Witches. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961.
Briggs, K.M. Pale Hecate's Team. New York: The Humanities Press, 1962.
Dworkin, Andrea, "What Were Those Witches Really Brewing?", Ms., April' 1974.
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers-. Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1973.
Hajnal, John. "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective," Population in History (ed. D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley). Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1965, pp. 101-143.
Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
Maple, Eric. The Dark World of Witches, New York: Pegasus, 1962.
Michelet, Jules. Satanism and Witchcraft: A Study in Medieval Superstition. New York: The Citadel Press, c. 1939.
Midelfort, H.C. Erik. Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972.
Rosen, Barbara (ed.). Witchcraft. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1969.
Sergeant, Philip W. Witches and Warlocks. New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1972.
Seth, Ronald. Witches and Their Craft. London: Odhama Books, 1967.
Spengler, Joseph J. "Demographic Factors and Early Modern Economic Development," Daedalus, 97 (1968): pp. 433-46.
Summers, Montague. The History of Witchcraft. New Hyde Park: University Books, 1956. Forword by-Felix Morrow.
Summers, Rev. Montague (ed.). Malleus Maleficarum. New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc. 1928.
Trevor-Roper, H.R. The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1956.
Van de Walle, Etienne. "Marriage and Marital Fertility," Daedalus, 97 (1968): pp. 486-501.
Wrigley, E.A. "Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England," Economic History Review, 19 (1966): pp. 82-100.
The following is an article from the journal Women and Revolution, Autumn 1974. This is a subject that has always interested me as a part of the question of the transformation from feudalism to early capitalism. Obviously the subject has received more updated coverage but the political points in the article are relevant to any such study. Also check the bibliography for a decent start to any scholarly interest on the subject.
Witchcraft and Statecraft: A Materialist Analysis of the European Witch Persecutions by D.L.Reissner, Women and Revolution, Autumn 1974
Several years have elapsed since the heyday of feminist organizations with names like W.I.T.C.H. (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and Red Witch, but many feminists have continued to identify themselves with witches, as is attested to by several recently published articles, including "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers" by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English and "What Were Those Witches Really Brewing?", by Andrea Dworkin which appeared in the April issue of Ms. This identification rests apparently on the feminists' view of witches as early prototypes of the liberated woman, although a little research of witch practices could seriously weaken this assumption. For example, each coven (local organization) of twelve witches was presided over by a man who played the role of the Devil, and it was standard practice at sabbats (witches' meetings) that each witch showed her respect to him by kissing his posterior and penis; this was known as the "kiss of shame." Furthermore, no sabbat was complete until the "Devil" had engaged in sexual intercourse with all 12 witches.
It is not surprising that the history of European witchcraft and witch persecutions (the New England witch trials, which occurred on a relatively small scale and in a different social context at the very end of the European witch craze, must be considered separately) should evoke great interest among people concerned with women's liberation, because it is a segment of the history of the oppression of women which is virtually unparalleled in its scope, duration and intensity. As Marxists, however, we approach this history in a way which is different both from the approach of feminists and from that of most other bourgeois historians whose analyses tend to be psychological, anthropological or merely romantic.
The European witch craze must be viewed as one component in the complex economic, social and political dynamic which transformed European civilization in the period between the 13th and 17th centuries and which included the rise of capitalism and the emergence of Protestantism. Of particular significance to an understanding of the witch craze was the consolidation of modern territorial nation-states during this period, for, as this article will seek to show, the witch craze was in the first instance an attempt to deal with the problem of socially inassimilable peoples in the face of this national consolidation.
Witches Have Not Always Been Persecuted
Ever since the 18th century there has been a tendency to regard European history from the Renaissance onward as inevitably progressive. Yet the same era which witnessed the flowering of Renaissance culture also produced the witch craze—a mania of terror and repression unknown in the so-called "Dark" Ages. Estimates vary, but the most conservative concede that at least 30,000 persons lost their lives as witches during this time—85 percent of them women.
Now that belief in the efficacy of witchcraft has become less, fashionable in this part of the world, there is a tendency to dismiss it as nothing more than a delusion of a few unbalanced minds, but witch practices have existed since ancient times and among all peoples. In fact, one of the most striking aspects of witchcraft is the uniformity of its practice in widely separated countries and civilizations. In India, just as in England, the cat is believed to be the witch's familiar, and in ancient Italy the evil eye was dreaded as it is in many parts of Africa today and was guarded against by the same symbol.
When religions establish themselves in new territories, the god or gods of the old religion become the devils (the word "devil," derived from the same root
as "divine," means "little god") of the new. Then fortune-telling, the special province of the witch or wise woman, which had been called prophecy when it
had been done in the name of the established religion, is designated as witchcraft. And so it was when Christianity superseded the older totemic cults of
Western Europe—cults which had honored female sexuality as the embodiment of the regenerative power of nature.
While the Church was formally opposed to these relics of paganism which continued to exist alongside Christianity, it found it politic, given their broad popular appeal, to accommodate itself to them in practice or even to co-opt them. In fact when in 1257 the Dominican Order, which had been established to combat the Albigensian and Vaudois heresies, uncovered witch practices in Southern France and requested that Pope Alexander DC grant it jurisdiction over witches as well as heretics, he refused. Not for another 200 years were the Dominicans to have their way unobstructed by the Catholic Church.
The Church based its position on the Canon Episcopi, a document dating back to the ninth century at least, which attempted to minimize the importance of witch practices not through persecution—Charlemagne had declared the burning of witches a capital crime as early as 785 AJD.—but through denying the very existence of witches and ridiculing belief in them:
"Some -wicked women, reverting to Satan, and seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess that they ride at night with Diana on certain beasts, with an innumerable company of women, passing over immense distances, obeying her command as their mistress, and evoked by her on ‘certain nights.... Therefore priests everywhere should preach that they know this to be false, and that such phantasms are sent by the Evil Spirit, who deludes them in dreams. Who is there who is not led out of himself in dreams, seeing much in sleeping that he never saw in waking? And who is such a fool that he believes that to happen in the body which is done only in the spirit?"
As late as the 12th century, John of Salisbury continued to dismiss the idea of the witches' sabbat as a fabulous dream. Yet this skeptical toleration was soon to give way to the hysteria of the witch craze, and woe to the occasional skeptic then, for he too would rapidly fall under suspicion.
The horror of the persecutions—the carefully refined tortures, the sexual degradation, the unspeakable anguish which wrung from the victims accusations against their friends, spouses and children—these are well documented and need not be elaborated here. Suffice it to say that at the height of the witch craze the intensity of the persecutions was such that in at least two villages in Germany only one woman was left alive.
Pessimism 0f Protestantism?
Given the fact that witchcraft had existed more or less undisturbed since ancient times, an analysis of the witch persecutions turns upon the answer to the question of why they erupted at the particular moment which they did.
The historical context in which the craze reached its height was one of unprecedented social upheaval. This was the period of the Hundred Years' War, the
rise of capitalism, the consolidation of nation-states, the Black Death, the discovery of the' New World, the Protestant Reformation and a series of religious,
wars so devastating that some historians contend that the European economy has not yet recovered from them. Such periods of social disturbance always give
rise to increased superstitions and unorthodox beliefs, and several students of the witch craze, including Jules Michelet and Julio Caro Baroja, claim that it grew out of the catastrophes of the 14th century and the widespread pessimism which these
catastrophes engendered.
Michelet points, out that while witchcraft had been practiced for hundreds of years, certain of its aspects, including the pact with the devil, did not appear before the 14th century. The reason for this, he argues, is that before this times people had not been sufficiently desperate to conceive of such a thing, but with the coming of an age in which the peasant was for the first time' required to pay quit-rents (rents paid in lieu of obligatory feudal services) and taxes in money, the concept of a pact with the devil became extremely attractive. Says Michelet:
"The pact required an age in which Hell itself appeared as a shelter, an asylum, a relief, as contrasted with the Hell of this world."
But while belief in witchcraft within primitive and modern societies 'alike increases as a result of social catastrophe and pessimism, this is clearly inadequate as the sole explanation for 400 years of terror. As the historian H.R. Trevor-Roper points out, the craze gathered force before either the Black Death or the Hundred Years' War had begun and-continued for two centuries after they were over—centuries marked by general recovery and expansion.
Another explanation often put forward for the outbreak of witch persecutions in this period is that they were a peculiarly Protestant phenomenon and arose therefore as a result of the Protestant Reformation.
It is true that both Luther and Calvin professed belief in witches and declared that they should be burned, and it is also true that the pattern of the witch persecutions coincided closely with the course of the religious wars, both on the Continent and in Britain, but there is no more basis for linking the craze with Protestantism than with Catholicism. It was in fact a product of the conflict between them. The Protestants carried the witch craze to the countries which they conquered for the Reformation while the Catholic Jesuits introduced it equally into the countries which they reconquered for Rome, including Bavaria, the Rhineland, Flanders and Poland. Toulouse, the capital of the witch burners, was a great center of Catholic orthodoxy. It is also noteworthy that it was the Protestant rather than the Catholic countries which took the lead in bringing the witch craze to a halt. By 1700 England and Holland had long since abandoned the persecution of witches on a large scale while the Catholic prince-bishops of Germany were still 'burning them by the score.
Since Protestants supposedly rejected all doctrine which the corrupt papacy had added to the Bible and the writings of the early Church Fathers, they should have logically rejected the dendrology of the Inquisition as well. In fact, this point was raised repeatedly by isolated Protestant critics, but without effect. Although they frequently burned Catholics as witches, the Protestant witch hunters continued to refer approvingly to the Dominican handbook of the witch craze, the Malleus Malificarum, Catholic inquisitors returned the compliment by citing Protestant authorities on the subject such as Erastus and Daneau. In other words, although the witch persecutions waxed and waned in direct proportion to the degree of religious conflict in each area, they were not fundamentally the product of doctrinal differences, but rather, as Trevor-Roper convincingly argues, of social differences and specifically of the demand for social assimilation which became acute in this period.
In those instances where there wars no such demand, there were no witch persecutions. For example, at the height of the witch craze, the Swedish Lutherans discovered that the Lapps in the territory they governed were imbued with witch beliefs. The Lutheran Church took no action in this case. Since there was no desire to socially integrate the Lapp dissenters, there was likewise no compulsion to persecute them for their witch practices.
The link between the witch persecutions and the question of social assimilation is apparent from the very beginning. When the Dominicans made their discovery of witchcraft in 1257 in" the "dark corners" of Europe, i.e., the Alps and the Pyrenees, they were disturbed not by the old rural superstitions per se, which were considered harmless enough, but by the fact that they were practiced by the people of a mountain civilization which appeared quite alien to the civilization of the plains—socially, culturally, economically and probably racially. These were the people who had retreated to the hinterlands of Europe at an early period. Feudalism had never penetrated this area in more than a superficial way, and neither had Christianity. Unlike the civilization of the plains, which was based on the cultivation of the land and the institution of the manor, the civilization of the mountains was pastoral and individualistic. The discovery of Witchcraft among these people must have come as no surprise to the Dominicans, yet the same practices which had been tolerated in the feudal towns and villages appeared far more ominous when viewed across an unbridgeable social chasm. The Dominicans reacted in a novel and unexpected way: they attempted to persecute the witches as heretics.
As we have seen, the papacy refused to support such persecutions at this time, but as the demand for social homogeneity became more urgent, the Dominican crusade became the wave of the future.
Witchcraft and Statecraft
The medieval concept of society had been based on an ideal of universality embodied in the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. Despite this ideal, however, medieval political, judicial and economic institutions, operating within the confines of an agrarian economy, were almost invariably local. During the 12th and 13th centuries, however, the economic conditions which had made such local autonomy inevitable began to disappear. The revival of commerce and the growth of cities increased the circulation of money and the expansion of trade to the point at which local autonomy became financially impractical. During the 14th and 15th centuries, the feudal suzerainties of local lords were gradually transformed into absolute monarchies. Behind this enormous change lay the power of; a new social class—the growing class of capitalist entrepreneurs whose business needs had outgrown feudal social institutions and who now demanded the larger sphere of operation which only a territorial state could provide.
The welding of a nation-state—the creation of a "people" with a sense of common identity—demanded social homogeneity, including religious homogeneity. To be Spanish meant to be Catholic; to be English, Anglican. Moreover, religious homogeneity was important to emerging rulers not only because it enabled them to bind their subjects more closely and to disguise territorial aggression as holy war, but also because it enabled them to control their subjects much more effectively. The established church was in each locality an arm of the state apparatus. To the extent that there were citizens beyond its reach, they represented a threat to the newly established order.
Thus the period of the witch craze is also the period in which the Jews and Moors were expelled from Spain, the Protestants were expelled from France, the Puritans were hounded out of England and the Inquisition was at the height of its power. The conjuncture of these persecutions is hardly coincidental. They are all, at least in part, attempts to deal with the problem of socially inassimilable peoples during the ‘period of the consolidation of European nation-states. The witch craze cannot be understood apart from this larger social movement of which it was an aspect. This understanding, incidentally, was not lost on the authorities of the time, who not infrequently launched campaigns of persecution against all the stereotypes of unassimilability in their particular areas; for instance, Protestants, Jews and witches in Trier.
"Most Women are Witches"
The one aspect of the witch persecutions which did distinguish them from all other persecutions of the period was that their victims were overwhelmingly women, particularly older women between 50 and 70 years of age and very often women who were unusually independent in one way or another—widows, spinsters, midwives. Not that men were exempt from persecution, but as Jacob Sprenger, co-author of the Malleus Malificahan, wrote: "We should speak of the Heresy of the Sorceresses, not of the Sorcerers, for the latter are of small account."
The Judaeo-Christian tradition had long rationalized the social oppression of women by designating them as weak and sinful and easily tempted by the devil. The Jewish Talmud makes this clear by its statement, "Women are naturally inclined to witchcraft," and "The more women there are, the more witchcraft there will be," and again, "Most women are witches."
Christianity postulated that men were protected from becoming witches not only by virtue of their superior intellect and faith, but also because Jesus Christ had died, as it said in the Malleus, "to preserve1 the male sex from so great a crime."
Women were regarded as particularly prone to diabolical temptation not merely because they were deemed intellectually and spiritually inferior to men, but also and especially because they were believed to be sexually insatiable. La the Malleus it is woman's carnality which is offered as the ultimate proof of her predisposition to witchcraft: "All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable."
It was only this view of women which made the endless confessions of seduction by the devil plausible, for they corroborated the popular conception of the nature of female sexuality.
But this long-standing attitude does not in itself explain the outbreak of bitter misogynism which has been observed in this period. Recently published demographic findings, as historian Erik Midlefort has noted, suggest the basis for a more substantial explanation.
The European Marriage Pattern
Demographer John Hajnal has demonstrated that one of the most profound changes that Europe has ever experienced dates roughly from the 15th or 16th centuries. This is the appearance of the "European marriage pattern"—a pattern characterized by relatively late marriage and by large proportions of people who never marry. The percentage of these single people rose in this period from about five percent of the population to 15 or 20 percent.
It was this shift toward later marriage which laid the basis for the nuclear family, since in societies where there is little control over conception the age of partners at marriage is one of the most important variables bearing upon the reproduction rate. It also facilitated the Industrial Revolution by raising the average income and making it possible for savings to be devoted to improving capital assets rather than supporting population growth. Of immediate importance was the fact that for the first time in European history there was a very large percentage of unmarried women, whose ranks were further augmented by widows created by the frequent wars, plagues and emigration. (With regard to the plague, it is noteworthy that in some areas it was fatal for up to ten times as many men as women in the population, possibly because women were more bound to the home and thus less exposed to contagion.) At the same time convents, once the sole refuge of spinsters, were being dismantled in Protestant countries, and even in Catholic countries they were on the. decline.
In a society which was totally patriarchal and family-centered and which provided no social role for women outside the family, the growing numbers of single women were regarded as at least peculiar and possibly seditious, especially after the death of
their fathers removed them from patriarchal control entirely. And in fact widows and spinsters were accused of witchcraft in numbers far out of proportion to their representation in society. Of course, the fact that these women were unprotected made them more vulnerable to attack, but the essential point to be made is that it was the unprecedented existence of large numbers of women outside the protection of the family which brought them under suspicion in the first place. Aside from spinsters and widows, the women who came under attack for witchcraft most often were lay medical practitioners of one sort or another, particularly midwives. As the Malleus says:
"... as penitent witches have often told to us and to others, saying: No one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than midwives. For when they do not kill children, as if for some other purpose they take them out of the room and, raising them up in the air, offer them to devils."
Country medicine, the medicine of the poor, was often, although by no means exclusively, practiced by women, and witches were often "accused" of having the power to heal. In fact, they-did develop herbal remedies, some of which are still in use. It has also been discovered that the ointment with which they anointed themselves before "flying" to the sabbats contained hallucinogenic properties such that the feeling of "flying might indeed ensue.
Feminists Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have made the interesting point that the rising European medical profession played an active role in suppressing all lay competition during this period, including the medicine of the "white" (good) witches, although to consider this the fundamental basis of the European witch craze is superficial, and to assert, as they do, that male and female healers were on opposite sides of a class struggle because women served the "people" while men served the ruling class is crude and inaccurate.
The Witch Craze Burns Out
In his Dictionnalre Philosophise written in 1764, Voltaire quipped:
"It is a great pity that there are no longer any persons possessed by the Devil, or magicians, or astrologers, or genii. One cannot conceive how useful all these
mysteries were a hundred years ago. In those days, the nobility lived in castles. The winter evenings were long and everyone would have died of boredom if these
noble entertainments had not been available.... Every village had its own sorcerer and witch; every prince his astrologer; all the ladies had their fortunes told;
those possessed by the Devil wandered all over the place; everyone wanted to know who had seen the Devil or who was going to see him; and all this provided an
endless topic of conversation which kept everyone in suspense. Nowadays we play insipid card games and have lost a lot by losing our illusions."
Voltaire could afford to joke for he had the good fortune to live at a time, when such jokes no longer led inescapably to the Inquisition and the stake. The
witch craze, along with other mass-forms of fanatical religious persecution, began to dissolve in both Protestant and Catholic countries in Western Europe in the mid-17th century. By this time, the wars of religion were coming to an end, territorial nation-states were more securely consolidated and the "alien" social groups within them had been for the most part either assimilated, exterminated or expelled.
Furthermore, witch beliefs seemed far less credible, among certain groups at least, during the age of science and skepticism which the commercial revolution had ushered in. The assumption that a neighbor's malice could cause physical harm had seemed more likely in a subsistence-level village where social cooperation was a vital necessity than it did in the 17th century when increased economic individualism and greater social mobility were severing the older collective ties.
Although occasional witch persecutions continued until the 1850's, and although witchcraft long remained a criminal offense in many countries, including England where it was not removed from the statute books until 22 June 1951, by the beginning of the 18th century the witch craze was unmistakably dead. It would be some time, however, before cosmopolitan wits such as Voltaire began to consider the subject amusing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buroja, Julio Caro. The World of the Witches. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961.
Briggs, K.M. Pale Hecate's Team. New York: The Humanities Press, 1962.
Dworkin, Andrea, "What Were Those Witches Really Brewing?", Ms., April' 1974.
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers-. Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1973.
Hajnal, John. "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective," Population in History (ed. D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley). Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1965, pp. 101-143.
Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
Maple, Eric. The Dark World of Witches, New York: Pegasus, 1962.
Michelet, Jules. Satanism and Witchcraft: A Study in Medieval Superstition. New York: The Citadel Press, c. 1939.
Midelfort, H.C. Erik. Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972.
Rosen, Barbara (ed.). Witchcraft. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1969.
Sergeant, Philip W. Witches and Warlocks. New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1972.
Seth, Ronald. Witches and Their Craft. London: Odhama Books, 1967.
Spengler, Joseph J. "Demographic Factors and Early Modern Economic Development," Daedalus, 97 (1968): pp. 433-46.
Summers, Montague. The History of Witchcraft. New Hyde Park: University Books, 1956. Forword by-Felix Morrow.
Summers, Rev. Montague (ed.). Malleus Maleficarum. New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc. 1928.
Trevor-Roper, H.R. The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1956.
Van de Walle, Etienne. "Marriage and Marital Fertility," Daedalus, 97 (1968): pp. 486-501.
Wrigley, E.A. "Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England," Economic History Review, 19 (1966): pp. 82-100.
Saturday, March 01, 2008
"Woman's Sphere" in the Rise of American Capitalism
Book Review
March is Women’s History Month
The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835, Nancy F. Cott, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1977
As I noted previously in a review of Paul E. Johnson’s A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, an account of the rise of the industrial capitalists of Rochester, New York in the 1830's, in any truly socialist understanding of history the role of the class struggle plays a central role. However, the uneven development of society throughout history has created other forms of oppression that need to be address. In America the question of the special oppression of blacks as a race clearly fits that demand. And everywhere the woman question cries out for solution.
Any thoughtful socialist wants to, in fact needs to, know how the various classes in society were formed, and transformed, over time. I have mentioned previously that a lot of useful work in this area has been done by socialist scholars. One thinks of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, for example. One needs to have a sense about the evolution of the forms of woman’s oppression, as well. One does not, however, need to be a socialist to do such research in order to provide us with plenty of ammunition in our fight for a better world. One of the great developments of the past thirty or forty years is the dramatic increase in research, led by the feminist resurgence, on woman’s history. The book under review here Nancy Cott’s study of the role of women in early capitalist America, The Bonds of Womanhood, is an early such addition.
I have mentioned in other reviews of this period in American history that the changes from an agrarian/mercantile society as found at the time of the American Revolution to the contours of an industrial society in the Age of Jackson were dramatic and longstanding. This was also the case with the role of women. Women, due to their biological function, have always been central to the cohesion of the family throughout class history. The form that has taken however has varied with changes in the economic superstructure. Thus such occurrences, due to the nature of industrial development, as the decrease in extended families, the dividing of work from the home, the putting out system, the dominance of the male as ‘breadwinner’ and the domestication of women as center of family life had profound changes in the way the family related to the world, the way children were socialized and the way woman subordinated their desires and creativity to the tasks at hand. Sound familiar?
Professor Cott makes her case for this observable change by looking at changes of various types of New England families from self-sufficient farmers to producers for the market, etc. She also relies heavily, as all historians of necessity must, on the record left behind by women mainly through their diaries. There are certain methodological problems inherent in that approach and a tendency to generalize off of the relatively small numbers for whom a record survives but nevertheless her early work is the starting place for a better understanding of the crisis in the family that occurred with the rise of capitalism in America.
I would note as a sidelight that her digging up various self-help manuals of the time for child-rearing and other domestic responsibilities was quite interesting. Dr. Spock, in the last generation, and today Oprah and Doctor Phil and their ilk thus come from a long pedigree of those who had something to say about the correct raising of YOUR children. Read on.
March is Women’s History Month
The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835, Nancy F. Cott, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1977
As I noted previously in a review of Paul E. Johnson’s A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, an account of the rise of the industrial capitalists of Rochester, New York in the 1830's, in any truly socialist understanding of history the role of the class struggle plays a central role. However, the uneven development of society throughout history has created other forms of oppression that need to be address. In America the question of the special oppression of blacks as a race clearly fits that demand. And everywhere the woman question cries out for solution.
Any thoughtful socialist wants to, in fact needs to, know how the various classes in society were formed, and transformed, over time. I have mentioned previously that a lot of useful work in this area has been done by socialist scholars. One thinks of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, for example. One needs to have a sense about the evolution of the forms of woman’s oppression, as well. One does not, however, need to be a socialist to do such research in order to provide us with plenty of ammunition in our fight for a better world. One of the great developments of the past thirty or forty years is the dramatic increase in research, led by the feminist resurgence, on woman’s history. The book under review here Nancy Cott’s study of the role of women in early capitalist America, The Bonds of Womanhood, is an early such addition.
I have mentioned in other reviews of this period in American history that the changes from an agrarian/mercantile society as found at the time of the American Revolution to the contours of an industrial society in the Age of Jackson were dramatic and longstanding. This was also the case with the role of women. Women, due to their biological function, have always been central to the cohesion of the family throughout class history. The form that has taken however has varied with changes in the economic superstructure. Thus such occurrences, due to the nature of industrial development, as the decrease in extended families, the dividing of work from the home, the putting out system, the dominance of the male as ‘breadwinner’ and the domestication of women as center of family life had profound changes in the way the family related to the world, the way children were socialized and the way woman subordinated their desires and creativity to the tasks at hand. Sound familiar?
Professor Cott makes her case for this observable change by looking at changes of various types of New England families from self-sufficient farmers to producers for the market, etc. She also relies heavily, as all historians of necessity must, on the record left behind by women mainly through their diaries. There are certain methodological problems inherent in that approach and a tendency to generalize off of the relatively small numbers for whom a record survives but nevertheless her early work is the starting place for a better understanding of the crisis in the family that occurred with the rise of capitalism in America.
I would note as a sidelight that her digging up various self-help manuals of the time for child-rearing and other domestic responsibilities was quite interesting. Dr. Spock, in the last generation, and today Oprah and Doctor Phil and their ilk thus come from a long pedigree of those who had something to say about the correct raising of YOUR children. Read on.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
*BLACK WOMEN'S NARRATIVES OF SLAVERY, THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Professor Henry Louis Gates.
THIS ARTICLE IS REPRINTED FROM THE JOURNAL BLACK HISTORY AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE FOR 2005
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH. MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH
Black Women's Narratives of Slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction
by Carla Wilson
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 841, 4 February 2005.
Most stories of black women's lives under slavery have never been told. Slave masters routinely brutalized black girls and women, justifying their dehumanizing treatment by labeling them "sexual savages." Stripped, beaten, raped and forced to work as "breed sows," black women suffered a double burden under slavery because of their sex. Men wrote the majority of published accounts of slave life, the most well known being the classic Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. These slave narratives were often produced under the guidance of the anti-slavery movement, using "moral suasion" against slavery to influence a church-going audience, and therefore avoided the topic of sexual oppression so as not to shock the Victorian audiences they approached for aid.
More than one hundred book-length narratives were written before the end of the American Civil War. The mere existence of former slaves' writings and oratory indicted the theories of racial and mental inferiority that justified the slave system. In this way, the act of exposing the horrors of slavery became vital to the struggle against it. During the 19th century, journalists, schoolteachers and local historians interviewed former slave women, and in the 1920s and 1930s more than two thousand former slaves were interviewed by the Works Progress Administration Federal Writers' Project and by researchers at Fisk and Southern Universities. Most of the Slave Narrative Collection was kept in typescript in the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress for nearly 40 years. This wealth of oral history was frequently dismissed as spurious, but after the civil rights movement, and even more recently, due to film documentaries like PBS's Unchained Memories, they have found wider interest.
Two valuable slave accounts by women document the period leading up to the Civil War and through the defeat of Radical Reconstruction. One is a work of immense historical research, thoughtfully written by retired English professor Jean Pagan Yellin. Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Basic Civitas Books, 2004) expands on the events and people that shaped Jacobs' own Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (Harvard University Press, 1987). As recently as two decades ago, Jacobs' autobiographical sketch was considered an obscure work penned by white abolitionist and editor Lydia Maria Child. With Jacobs' authorship authenticated in the mid 1980s, hers became the first recognized slave narrative by a black woman.
The other story, The Bondwoman's Narrative (Warner Books, 2002), is a semi-fictional work that dates from the 1850s. Discovered at an auction by Harvard African American Studies scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., the only person to even bid on the manuscript, the book spent months on the New York Times best-seller list when it was published in 2002.
The fact that a black woman and former slave in the 19th century authored a novel has played a role in generating vigorous interest in this work of fiction. Its authentication meant that a black literary tradition existed much earlier than acknowledged. It also has much to do with the energetic quest for the identity of the author led by Gates, who rescued the book from historical oblivion.
The Bondwoman's Narrative represents an important work because it deals effectively with the role of sexual and physical oppression of black women under slavery. Moreover, unlike many published slave narratives, this book is a manuscript in the author's own handwriting, offering a unique window into the mind of a female slave. Caste, color and class—linked to widely-practiced miscegenation of master and slave—are at the core of this sentimental, gothic-style novel. An intriguing aspect of the story is the snobbery based on skin-color privileges and expectations of preferences in plantation life.
The main character of The Bondwoman's Narrative is Hannah, a North Carolina house slave serving as handmaid to a mistress passing for a white woman. She is well treated, observant and literate, attentive to every secret of her mistress. When Hannah's mistress' passing as a white woman is about to be exposed as a fraud, Hannah convinces her to escape North. They fail, and land in prison. Once captured, they are left at the mercy of the executor of the estate of the racist master, who had killed himself after learning he married a black woman.
The executor is a singular force for evil in the tale—the blackmailer of the mistress as well as a slave speculator who trades on the value of light-skinned females, thought to be passing. As an estate manager, he searches through papers to expose the lineage of women and force them onto the "fancy market" in New Orleans' high-toned bordellos. Eventually, the mistress dies from shock when faced with being sold. Hannah is then given to a government official's wife in Washington, D.C., whose ignorance and impetuosity strike a portrait in which the slave is in a more decisive role. Hannah is made to read letters and draft replies for her barely literate mistress. After shrilly demanding a new face powder be fetched from the store, the mistress finds it turns her face black. In the aftermath of this makeup malfunction, the mistress is ridiculed throughout Washington and leaves for the North Carolina plantation, where she punishes Hannah by throwing her in with the field slaves.
Hannah is confronted with being a field hand and taken as a sexual partner to a darker-skinned black man with several female mates. Earlier asked to assist fellow slaves seeking freedom in the North, Hannah had told them, "their scheme looked wild and unpromising and that I feared the result would be unfortunate." She counsels those in flight that they will only face bloodhounds and slave patrols, then bloody torture for their failure. In contrast, in reaction to her own dilemma, her response is swift: "To be driven into the fields beneath the eye and lash of the brutal overseer, and those miserable huts, with their promiscuous crowds of dirty, obscene and degraded objects, for my home I could not, I would not bear it." She flees within 48 hours of being sent into the fields and huts, passing for a white boy, then a white woman, en route to freedom in the North. The impetus for her escape underscores the influence of racial disdain within the slave community and the inculcation of racist dogmas employed as justification for the "peculiar institution."
Incidents in the Life of an Anti-Slavery Heroine
Yellin's A Life was heralded by less fanfare, but this biography powerfully reveals author and activist Harriet Jacobs as a remarkable fighter for the oppressed. Using a pseudonym, Linda Brent, Jacobs wrote her story while in domestic service with a prominent liberal New York family. Links between literacy, black self-sufficiency and political consciousness are key themes in Jacobs' evolution from fugitive slave, to author, to activist teacher of new freedmen at the Jacobs School for black Civil War "refugees" in Alexandria, Virginia. The story of Harriet Jacobs is the story of an active abolitionist fighter who lived through the Civil War, struggled to implement the promises of Radical Reconstruction and witnessed the betrayal of these promises.
Born in 1813, Harriet Jacobs did not know she was a slave until her sixth year, when her mother died and she was willed to an infant girl. Her father lived only six years longer and Jacobs fondly recalls that, although he was illiterate, he became a skilled carpenter, trusted enough by his owners to work on houses in the country and town. From him, she and her younger brother, John, learned to prize education and freedom. Jacobs' slave life in Edenton, North Carolina, reflected the hierarchy of slave society—whites ruled over blacks, free black people ranked above slaves, but the status of slaves depended heavily on their masters, their skin color and their work as domestic labor or as field hands. Her parents were classified as mulattoes, and her grandmother, Molly, a slave who operated the town's Horniblow's Tavern, worked as a cook, seamstress and wet nurse, living freely on site. Harriet learned from her grandmother how to sew as a youngster, and her mistress taught her to read and spell—skills that would eventually help transform her life.
When Harriet turned twelve, her life altered dramatically when she and her brother were sold to Dr. James Norcom. At the same time, her father was moved out to a plantation far from Edenton. Harriet found herself left to the whims of Norcom, a sexual tyrant who stalked her in an effort to make her his concubine. "He told me I was his property; that I must be subjected to his will in all things. My soul revolted against the mean tyranny. But where could I turn for protection? No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men," Jacobs wrote.
Her account, published in 1861, revealed unspeakable acts of sexual coercion at a time when practically no one dared to speak of such things. She threw harsh light on the sexual brutality underlying reproduction of the slave system, where the violation of black women by white men stood side by side with the separation of families as a calculated, measured provocation aimed not only at women, but at the black men who necessarily reacted with deep humiliation and rage. As labor historian Jacqueline Jones has observed in Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (Vintage, 1986): "Whites often intervened in more direct ways to upset the sexual order that black men and women created for themselves, thereby obliterating otherwise viable courtship and marriage practices.... Masters frequently practiced a form of eugenics by withholding their permission for certain marriages and arranging others." A master might prohibit a marriage for any highhanded reason, forbidding a male slave to seek a wife elsewhere, since their offspring would not belong to him but to the wife's slaveowner. Jacobs, for example, had fallen in love with a free black carpenter who proposed to marry her, but Norcom refused the lover's effort to buy her out of slavery. It is impossible to know how commonplace Jacobs' story might have actually been.
For young Harriet, a desperate act of rebellion meant encouraging and accepting the advances of Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a youthful white lawyer of the town's aristocracy who ranked above Norcom in social standing. She bore him two children over several years. As a pro-slavery advocate in the North Carolina legislature of 1830, he joined in pushing through a wave of repressive measures aimed at control of free blacks and whites as well. New laws imposed strict penalties against teaching slaves to read or write, the harboring of runaway slaves and aiding runaways or emancipating them.
Less than three weeks after the North Carolina legislature's measures passed, the Nat Turner Revolt occurred in 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia. Deeply religious from childhood, Nat Turner was a skilled preacher and possessed some influence among local slaves. He planned attacks with a band of approximately 60 followers. After killing the family of Turner's owner, the band spread the revolt, in two days killing a total of 55 white people. The revolt was soon crushed; 13 slaves and three free blacks were hanged immediately. Turner himself escaped into the woods, but was captured, hanged, skinned and a purse made of his skin. Dozens more blacks were also killed in retaliation. The news traveled sixty miles downstream to Edenton and the repression that followed was roused with fifes blaring and drums sounding as white mobs formed roving bands of armed slave patrollers imposing martial law.
Fearful that Turner's revolt would inspire others to arms, slave masters put Edenton under round-the-clock patrols, with house-to-house searches. Jacobs recalls how the fear of Turner's revolt prompted slave owners to conclude "that it would be well to give the slaves enough of religious instruction to keep them from murdering their masters." Worried that any congregating of blacks meant seeds planted for insurrection, the slave masters reduced to rubble the meetinghouse blacks had built communally that served as their church; the congregation was forced to attend the white churches.
Harriet's own situation became more precarious as she grew sick and tired of trying to avoid sexual servitude under Norcom. Finally she fled to a crawlspace concealed beneath her grandmother's roof—a cell roughly seven feet wide, nine feet long and three feet high. There she would spend the next seven years, only leaving the house once. She subsequently escaped to the North in June 1842 and ended in the care of Philadelphia's Vigilant Committee, but as with many who traveled the Underground Railroad, she never divulged her route.
Abolitionist Fighter
Once in the free states of the North, Jacobs lived in constant trepidation, fearing Norcom and his heirs would seek to claim their "property." Her immediate focus was on finding her children, who had been sent North as servants to their father's kin. At first, Jacobs avoided the abolitionist circles, after an initial encounter in Philadelphia included a warning from Reverend Jeremiah Durham that she should avoid revealing her sexual history because some might treat her with "contempt." Later, she joined her brother, John S., who had escaped Norcom before her and had
become a well-known anti-slavery activist. He often shared platforms with abolitionist Frederick Douglass and also worked on the North Star. Eventually becoming a frequent letter contributor to the New York Daily Tribune, she gained courage to write her autobiography and later served as a correspondent for William Lloyd Garrison's the Liberator, as part of activist circles in Rochester, New York and Boston. Her views were no doubt shaped by her involvement with organized reformers from the anti-slavery and women's rights struggles in Rochester.
These abolitionists were part of a broad, bourgeois social radicalization among the 19th-century heirs to the Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals and the American Revolution. Although opposition to slavery was by no means as widespread in the 1830s as it was to become immediately before the Civil War, nonetheless many prominent men, such as the wealthy Tappan brothers of New York and Gerrit Smith, the biggest landowner in the North, had joined the movement by the middle of the decade. Garrison understood that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document but thought that the institution could be done away with peacefully through "moral suasion." The movement split in the 1840s around the questions of women's rights and how to end slavery. Garrison believed the pro-slavery U.S. Constitution should be abolished and that the North should expel the South. Another wing, represented by eminent men like the Tappan brothers, excluded women from office within their organization, was against women's rights and wanted to orient struggles toward political work in Congress. On the left wing of the abolitionist movement were militant ex-slaves, free blacks and white abolitionists— revolutionary fighters like Frederick Douglass and John Brown who became convinced that the fight must be against the whole system of slavery, by armed force, including arming black slaves. Douglass and the insurrectionist wing were thoroughgoing egalitarians and, therefore, were also the most consistent supporters of women's rights.
The Jacobs' move to Rochester coincided with her brother John's hiring by the abolitionists' Anti-Slavery Office and Reading Room. Jacobs stayed with her brother's friends, Isaac and Amy Post, frequent hosts to executive sessions of the Western New York State Anti-Slavery Society. A major feature of their work in the winter of 1849 was mounting protests against school segregation. At the time, the threat of a national compromise over slavery also loomed, as abolitionists countered pro-slavery arguments against expanding slavery to territories seized in the 1848 Mexican War. Nonetheless, Congress passed the Compromise of 1850, which maintained slavery in these areas. Measures included a more brutal version of the Fugitive Slave Law, which made it a crime for federal marshals not to arrest an alleged runaway slave and for anybody to assist a runaway, while also denying a suspected runaway any legal rights.
Amid this climate, Jacobs finally got her freedom when her close friend and employer negotiated the purchase of her freedom for three hundred dollars. She concludes her autobiographical account a freedwoman. According to Yellin, the draft text ended with a tribute to John Brown, but Lydia Maria Child, her editor, convinced Jacobs to drop it. Was this editorial measure a reflection of continuing debate among the pacifist Garrisonians over what course to take in the unfolding conflict?
It was certainly to Jacobs' credit, and an indication of her political allegiances, that she recognized the significance of Brown's October 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). In the battle that followed, Brown was wounded and ten of Brown's men—including two of his sons—were killed. Militarily defeated and hanged in punishment, Brown's political mission to destroy slavery by force of arms was spectacularly brought to conclusion by more than 200,000 freed slaves who fought in the Civil War.
At the outset, the "war between the states" was being fought only to "preserve the Union," and President Abraham Lincoln only opposed the extension of slavery. Karl Marx understood that the Civil War was at root a "conflict between the system of slavery and the system of free labor." Abolitionists sought to transform the war into a war of emancipation. Frederick Douglass insisted: "Let the slaves and free colored people be called into service, and formed into a liberating army, to march into the South and raise the banner of Emancipation among the slaves." It took two years of ignominious defeats led by politically unreliable Union Army generals to convince Lincoln of the necessity of freeing the slaves. After it became clear that the North could not win in any other way, he declared on 22 September 1862 all slaves in the Confederacy would be free on the first of January, 1863. Almost as important as freedom itself was the government's decision to form regiments of black soldiers. About 180,000 black soldiers served in the Union Army and as many as 29,000 men joined the Union Navy. This helped to turn the tide of battle. The Civil War and Reconstruction broke the class power of the slave South. It was the last great bourgeois revolution, the second American Revolution; the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were the legal codification of the revolutionary gains won at riflepoint by the interracial Union Army. The war and its aftermath ushered in the most democratic period for black people in U.S. history, underlining that a truly egalitarian radical vision of social reconstruction ultimately could not be fulfilled by a capitalist ruling class.
Civil War Years
Harriet Jacobs' role in the anti-slavery struggles and in the emerging Freedmen's Bureau was that of a political field worker. In October 1861, after Union General William Tecumseh Sherman led his troops in an attack on Confederate Fort Walker on Hilton Head Island, a decisive step was made in the Civil War. Sherman's army drew behind it hundreds of former slaves who set up camps on the Sea Islands along the Carolina Coast. Union authorities set up a Department of the South, taking over some 195 plantations, employing 10,000 former slaves to raise cotton and auctioning land off to Northerners and a few freedmen with a bit of money.
Sherman's occupation of Port Royal, South Carolina, became a starting point for the abolitionists and slaves to work together on Southern terrain. Historians have called this "Port Royal Experiment" a "dress rehearsal for Reconstruction." As W.E.B. DuBois later observed in Black Reconstruction in America (Atheneum, 1983): "The Negroes were willing to work and did work, but they wanted land to work, and they wanted to see and own the results of their toil. It was here and in the West and the South that a new vista opened. Here was a chance to establish an agrarian democracy in the South." It became clear to Jacobs that it was in places like Port Royal that the future of her people would be determined. She looked at reports from Port Royal and turned her eyes toward Washington. In the spring of 1862, Lincoln had not yet issued his Emancipation Proclamation, but in states that remained loyal to the Union, Congress had designated as "contrabands of war" any men, women and children escaping from Southern masters.
Jacobs' moving report of "Life Among the Contrabands," printed in the Liberator, details the chaos among these "refugees." She spent the spring and summer in Washington, setting up hospitals with the newly established Freedmen's Association. Her work often entailed a struggle against the civilian and military hierarchy in the refugee camps. The government-appointed superintendent of "contrabands" registered and hired people out as workers, with little attention to their needs. Jacobs spent her mornings in a small ground-floor room where "men, women and children lie here together, without a shadow of those rites which we give to our poorest dead. There they lie, in the filthy rags they wore from the plantation. Nobody seems to give it a thought. It is an everyday occurrence, and the scenes have become familiar."
Later that year, she moved to Union-occupied Alexandria and while distributing supplies of clothing and food, Jacobs began to envision a sustained mission. She would produce several letters over the next four years of work, articulating the freedmen's dreams for equality, land, education, jobs and housing. In lengthy letters to Lydia Maria Child she reported what she'd seen of black life, confident her writings would be printed in the abolitionist press. With Alexandria under Union occupation the people still suffered humiliations: "In return for their kindness and ever-ready service, they often receive insults, and sometimes beatings, and so they have learned to distrust those who wear the uniform of the U.S.," she notes. And, allowing herself a moment of outrage: "Oh, when will the white man learn to know the hearts of my abused and suffering people!" By midsummer, the federal superintendent in Alexandria was replaced, with improvements instigated from her collaboration with the Freedmen's Association.
In the summer of 1864. as Union Armies drew closer to taking Richmond, black "refugees" were drafted in response to threats on Alexandria, joining Union forces to defend the city against the Confederacy. Jacobs and her daughter Louisa organized the first commemoration of British West Indian Emancipation, featuring the presentation of a flag to the Colored Hospital— named L'Ouverture for the Haitian liberator—that had recently opened as a receiving place for the Colored Division of the Ninth Army Corps. She presented the flag to the surgeon in chief, addressing herself to black men in Union blues:
"Soldiers, what we have got came through the strength and valor of your right arms. Three years ago this flag had no significance for you, we could not cherish it as our emblem of freedom. You then had not part in the bloody struggle for your country, your patriotism was spurned; but to-day you are in arms for the freedom of your race and the defence of your country—to-day this flag is significant to you. Soldiers you have made it the symbol of freedom for the slave."
The Alexandria celebration was among many commemorations at which black fighters began to forge a sense of struggle not only for an end to slavery, but also to claim equal rights as American citizens.
Through the remaining days of the war, Jacobs volunteered in Alexandria as a visiting relief worker in the camp and in the hospitals. Freedmen there had already begun building a school and meetinghouse, which she pushed to find funding for at the first congress of the Women's National Loyal League. Jacobs coordinated aid with the goal of opening a free school under black leadership, volunteering her daughter Louisa and Virginia Lawton, the daughter of old Boston friends, as two "colored teachers." Jacobs School's doors opened to seventy-five students in January 1864. Given her name recognition among readers of Incidents, the school was featured in the reform press, with Alexandria becoming a regular stop on tours of the conquered South. A photo of Jacobs among her charges was carefully taken to publicize the ability of former slaves to become exemplary citizens. At the time, the photo hung prominently in the offices of the Frcedman's Record, By the end of March 1865, Congress established the Freedmen's Bureau, putting it in charge of relief and oversight for former slaves in the South.
Radical Reconstruction Overturned
Harriet and Louisa Jacobs later went to Savannah, where, Yellin notes, "both control of the schools and control of the land were at stake." Against local government resistance, they opened the Lincoln School, a black-run institution, and attempted to set up an orphanage and home for the elderly. Military rule ended just before Jacobs and her daughter arrived and, though posing as a protector, the Union Army also would be wielded to aid the city's powerful elite and stymie black efforts at freedom. The land question features in many of Jacobs' dispatches because the land with freedmen's settlements where schools were located was soon turned over to their old masters. Louisa's Lincoln School survived, but by January 1866, all freedmen were ordered to sign contracts for their labor.
The brief labor contracts, Jacobs wrote, "are very unjust. They are not allowed to have a boat or musket. They are not allowed to own a horse, cow, or pig. Many of them already own them, but must sell them if they remain on the plantations." The black population was disarmed. Backed by the Freedmen's Bureau, "free labor" meant that most blacks worked in cotton production, suffering working conditions akin to slave exploitation of prewar years. In exchange for backbreaking field work, the freedmen gave the former masters two-thirds of the crop, kept a third, then saw rations and rent deducted, resulting in a cycle of debt bondage.
However, Reconstruction posed a possibility of socially revolutionary transformations in the South: the regional ruling class, based on land and slaves, had been militarily defeated; under the occupying Northern power, black men and women, formerly slaves, exercised political rights for the first time in the South. Before the defeat of Reconstruction, many political offices in the South were held by black men.
Reconstruction not only brought about voting rights for black men and even many poor illiterate Southern white men but also ushered in the establishment of the South's first public schools, liberalized the South's barbaric penal code and reformed the planters' property tax system. These measures allowed for real prospects for schooling, land and jobs for black freedmen. But northern capitalists betrayed the promise of Reconstruction, allowing it to be physically smashed, aided by forces such as the Ku Klux Klan. In 1877, the last of the Union troops were withdrawn from Southern occupation, marking a compromise that put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House. From this defeat of Reconstruction grew the postwar Southern system of sharecropping, poll taxes, chain gangs, lynch law and "separate but equal"—i.e., unequal—Jim Crow facilities.
During Reconstruction, Jacobs and other female abolitionists working as teachers risked their lives to participate in freeing black people from the chains of bondage—their fight for free quality education was put front and center. But the sharpest debate raged over the question of land ownership. Freedmen and destitute white Unionist Southerners wanted the secessionists' estates confiscated, as at Port Royal, and distributed to them. Triumphant Northern rulers, however, would not permit an attack on "property rights," particularly as Northerners and Northern banks were grabbing up a good deal of Southern property. Intensive exploitation of black agricultural labor was allowed as the only way to rebuild the Southern economy, rather than industrial development or capital investment in modernization of agriculture.
This failure and betrayal of Reconstruction perpetuated the oppression of blacks as a color caste at the bottom of American capitalist society. This racial division, with whites on top of blacks, has been and continues to be the main historical obstacle to the development of political class consciousness among the American proletariat. It will take a third American Revolution, led by a multiracial workers party against capitalism itself, to break the fetters on blacks, women and all the oppressed.
Jacobs served with valor in the anti-slavery battles through Radical Reconstruction, but her story also fell victim to its defeat. At the time of her death in 1897, her name was barely remembered in the Boston abolitionist circles she once frequented. Even in her obituary, the Jacobs School and her relief work during the Civil War and Reconstruction were completely omitted. As the years passed, the memory of Jacobs faded and photos and records of her Alexandria school were lost. Even her book came to be seen as Child's.
Anyone who has ever wondered how black people managed to struggle and survive the hideous tortures meted out during slavery and afterward would gain a lot from reading these books. They offer inspiration to a new generation of fighters facing the daunting task of toppling the dominance of capitalist exploitation and sexual oppression today. Though the Civil War smashed slavery, the dreams of men and women like Jacobs remain to be realized. Finish the Civil War—For black liberation in a workers'America!
THIS ARTICLE IS REPRINTED FROM THE JOURNAL BLACK HISTORY AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE FOR 2005
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH. MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH
Black Women's Narratives of Slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction
by Carla Wilson
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 841, 4 February 2005.
Most stories of black women's lives under slavery have never been told. Slave masters routinely brutalized black girls and women, justifying their dehumanizing treatment by labeling them "sexual savages." Stripped, beaten, raped and forced to work as "breed sows," black women suffered a double burden under slavery because of their sex. Men wrote the majority of published accounts of slave life, the most well known being the classic Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. These slave narratives were often produced under the guidance of the anti-slavery movement, using "moral suasion" against slavery to influence a church-going audience, and therefore avoided the topic of sexual oppression so as not to shock the Victorian audiences they approached for aid.
More than one hundred book-length narratives were written before the end of the American Civil War. The mere existence of former slaves' writings and oratory indicted the theories of racial and mental inferiority that justified the slave system. In this way, the act of exposing the horrors of slavery became vital to the struggle against it. During the 19th century, journalists, schoolteachers and local historians interviewed former slave women, and in the 1920s and 1930s more than two thousand former slaves were interviewed by the Works Progress Administration Federal Writers' Project and by researchers at Fisk and Southern Universities. Most of the Slave Narrative Collection was kept in typescript in the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress for nearly 40 years. This wealth of oral history was frequently dismissed as spurious, but after the civil rights movement, and even more recently, due to film documentaries like PBS's Unchained Memories, they have found wider interest.
Two valuable slave accounts by women document the period leading up to the Civil War and through the defeat of Radical Reconstruction. One is a work of immense historical research, thoughtfully written by retired English professor Jean Pagan Yellin. Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Basic Civitas Books, 2004) expands on the events and people that shaped Jacobs' own Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (Harvard University Press, 1987). As recently as two decades ago, Jacobs' autobiographical sketch was considered an obscure work penned by white abolitionist and editor Lydia Maria Child. With Jacobs' authorship authenticated in the mid 1980s, hers became the first recognized slave narrative by a black woman.
The other story, The Bondwoman's Narrative (Warner Books, 2002), is a semi-fictional work that dates from the 1850s. Discovered at an auction by Harvard African American Studies scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., the only person to even bid on the manuscript, the book spent months on the New York Times best-seller list when it was published in 2002.
The fact that a black woman and former slave in the 19th century authored a novel has played a role in generating vigorous interest in this work of fiction. Its authentication meant that a black literary tradition existed much earlier than acknowledged. It also has much to do with the energetic quest for the identity of the author led by Gates, who rescued the book from historical oblivion.
The Bondwoman's Narrative represents an important work because it deals effectively with the role of sexual and physical oppression of black women under slavery. Moreover, unlike many published slave narratives, this book is a manuscript in the author's own handwriting, offering a unique window into the mind of a female slave. Caste, color and class—linked to widely-practiced miscegenation of master and slave—are at the core of this sentimental, gothic-style novel. An intriguing aspect of the story is the snobbery based on skin-color privileges and expectations of preferences in plantation life.
The main character of The Bondwoman's Narrative is Hannah, a North Carolina house slave serving as handmaid to a mistress passing for a white woman. She is well treated, observant and literate, attentive to every secret of her mistress. When Hannah's mistress' passing as a white woman is about to be exposed as a fraud, Hannah convinces her to escape North. They fail, and land in prison. Once captured, they are left at the mercy of the executor of the estate of the racist master, who had killed himself after learning he married a black woman.
The executor is a singular force for evil in the tale—the blackmailer of the mistress as well as a slave speculator who trades on the value of light-skinned females, thought to be passing. As an estate manager, he searches through papers to expose the lineage of women and force them onto the "fancy market" in New Orleans' high-toned bordellos. Eventually, the mistress dies from shock when faced with being sold. Hannah is then given to a government official's wife in Washington, D.C., whose ignorance and impetuosity strike a portrait in which the slave is in a more decisive role. Hannah is made to read letters and draft replies for her barely literate mistress. After shrilly demanding a new face powder be fetched from the store, the mistress finds it turns her face black. In the aftermath of this makeup malfunction, the mistress is ridiculed throughout Washington and leaves for the North Carolina plantation, where she punishes Hannah by throwing her in with the field slaves.
Hannah is confronted with being a field hand and taken as a sexual partner to a darker-skinned black man with several female mates. Earlier asked to assist fellow slaves seeking freedom in the North, Hannah had told them, "their scheme looked wild and unpromising and that I feared the result would be unfortunate." She counsels those in flight that they will only face bloodhounds and slave patrols, then bloody torture for their failure. In contrast, in reaction to her own dilemma, her response is swift: "To be driven into the fields beneath the eye and lash of the brutal overseer, and those miserable huts, with their promiscuous crowds of dirty, obscene and degraded objects, for my home I could not, I would not bear it." She flees within 48 hours of being sent into the fields and huts, passing for a white boy, then a white woman, en route to freedom in the North. The impetus for her escape underscores the influence of racial disdain within the slave community and the inculcation of racist dogmas employed as justification for the "peculiar institution."
Incidents in the Life of an Anti-Slavery Heroine
Yellin's A Life was heralded by less fanfare, but this biography powerfully reveals author and activist Harriet Jacobs as a remarkable fighter for the oppressed. Using a pseudonym, Linda Brent, Jacobs wrote her story while in domestic service with a prominent liberal New York family. Links between literacy, black self-sufficiency and political consciousness are key themes in Jacobs' evolution from fugitive slave, to author, to activist teacher of new freedmen at the Jacobs School for black Civil War "refugees" in Alexandria, Virginia. The story of Harriet Jacobs is the story of an active abolitionist fighter who lived through the Civil War, struggled to implement the promises of Radical Reconstruction and witnessed the betrayal of these promises.
Born in 1813, Harriet Jacobs did not know she was a slave until her sixth year, when her mother died and she was willed to an infant girl. Her father lived only six years longer and Jacobs fondly recalls that, although he was illiterate, he became a skilled carpenter, trusted enough by his owners to work on houses in the country and town. From him, she and her younger brother, John, learned to prize education and freedom. Jacobs' slave life in Edenton, North Carolina, reflected the hierarchy of slave society—whites ruled over blacks, free black people ranked above slaves, but the status of slaves depended heavily on their masters, their skin color and their work as domestic labor or as field hands. Her parents were classified as mulattoes, and her grandmother, Molly, a slave who operated the town's Horniblow's Tavern, worked as a cook, seamstress and wet nurse, living freely on site. Harriet learned from her grandmother how to sew as a youngster, and her mistress taught her to read and spell—skills that would eventually help transform her life.
When Harriet turned twelve, her life altered dramatically when she and her brother were sold to Dr. James Norcom. At the same time, her father was moved out to a plantation far from Edenton. Harriet found herself left to the whims of Norcom, a sexual tyrant who stalked her in an effort to make her his concubine. "He told me I was his property; that I must be subjected to his will in all things. My soul revolted against the mean tyranny. But where could I turn for protection? No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men," Jacobs wrote.
Her account, published in 1861, revealed unspeakable acts of sexual coercion at a time when practically no one dared to speak of such things. She threw harsh light on the sexual brutality underlying reproduction of the slave system, where the violation of black women by white men stood side by side with the separation of families as a calculated, measured provocation aimed not only at women, but at the black men who necessarily reacted with deep humiliation and rage. As labor historian Jacqueline Jones has observed in Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (Vintage, 1986): "Whites often intervened in more direct ways to upset the sexual order that black men and women created for themselves, thereby obliterating otherwise viable courtship and marriage practices.... Masters frequently practiced a form of eugenics by withholding their permission for certain marriages and arranging others." A master might prohibit a marriage for any highhanded reason, forbidding a male slave to seek a wife elsewhere, since their offspring would not belong to him but to the wife's slaveowner. Jacobs, for example, had fallen in love with a free black carpenter who proposed to marry her, but Norcom refused the lover's effort to buy her out of slavery. It is impossible to know how commonplace Jacobs' story might have actually been.
For young Harriet, a desperate act of rebellion meant encouraging and accepting the advances of Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a youthful white lawyer of the town's aristocracy who ranked above Norcom in social standing. She bore him two children over several years. As a pro-slavery advocate in the North Carolina legislature of 1830, he joined in pushing through a wave of repressive measures aimed at control of free blacks and whites as well. New laws imposed strict penalties against teaching slaves to read or write, the harboring of runaway slaves and aiding runaways or emancipating them.
Less than three weeks after the North Carolina legislature's measures passed, the Nat Turner Revolt occurred in 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia. Deeply religious from childhood, Nat Turner was a skilled preacher and possessed some influence among local slaves. He planned attacks with a band of approximately 60 followers. After killing the family of Turner's owner, the band spread the revolt, in two days killing a total of 55 white people. The revolt was soon crushed; 13 slaves and three free blacks were hanged immediately. Turner himself escaped into the woods, but was captured, hanged, skinned and a purse made of his skin. Dozens more blacks were also killed in retaliation. The news traveled sixty miles downstream to Edenton and the repression that followed was roused with fifes blaring and drums sounding as white mobs formed roving bands of armed slave patrollers imposing martial law.
Fearful that Turner's revolt would inspire others to arms, slave masters put Edenton under round-the-clock patrols, with house-to-house searches. Jacobs recalls how the fear of Turner's revolt prompted slave owners to conclude "that it would be well to give the slaves enough of religious instruction to keep them from murdering their masters." Worried that any congregating of blacks meant seeds planted for insurrection, the slave masters reduced to rubble the meetinghouse blacks had built communally that served as their church; the congregation was forced to attend the white churches.
Harriet's own situation became more precarious as she grew sick and tired of trying to avoid sexual servitude under Norcom. Finally she fled to a crawlspace concealed beneath her grandmother's roof—a cell roughly seven feet wide, nine feet long and three feet high. There she would spend the next seven years, only leaving the house once. She subsequently escaped to the North in June 1842 and ended in the care of Philadelphia's Vigilant Committee, but as with many who traveled the Underground Railroad, she never divulged her route.
Abolitionist Fighter
Once in the free states of the North, Jacobs lived in constant trepidation, fearing Norcom and his heirs would seek to claim their "property." Her immediate focus was on finding her children, who had been sent North as servants to their father's kin. At first, Jacobs avoided the abolitionist circles, after an initial encounter in Philadelphia included a warning from Reverend Jeremiah Durham that she should avoid revealing her sexual history because some might treat her with "contempt." Later, she joined her brother, John S., who had escaped Norcom before her and had
become a well-known anti-slavery activist. He often shared platforms with abolitionist Frederick Douglass and also worked on the North Star. Eventually becoming a frequent letter contributor to the New York Daily Tribune, she gained courage to write her autobiography and later served as a correspondent for William Lloyd Garrison's the Liberator, as part of activist circles in Rochester, New York and Boston. Her views were no doubt shaped by her involvement with organized reformers from the anti-slavery and women's rights struggles in Rochester.
These abolitionists were part of a broad, bourgeois social radicalization among the 19th-century heirs to the Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals and the American Revolution. Although opposition to slavery was by no means as widespread in the 1830s as it was to become immediately before the Civil War, nonetheless many prominent men, such as the wealthy Tappan brothers of New York and Gerrit Smith, the biggest landowner in the North, had joined the movement by the middle of the decade. Garrison understood that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document but thought that the institution could be done away with peacefully through "moral suasion." The movement split in the 1840s around the questions of women's rights and how to end slavery. Garrison believed the pro-slavery U.S. Constitution should be abolished and that the North should expel the South. Another wing, represented by eminent men like the Tappan brothers, excluded women from office within their organization, was against women's rights and wanted to orient struggles toward political work in Congress. On the left wing of the abolitionist movement were militant ex-slaves, free blacks and white abolitionists— revolutionary fighters like Frederick Douglass and John Brown who became convinced that the fight must be against the whole system of slavery, by armed force, including arming black slaves. Douglass and the insurrectionist wing were thoroughgoing egalitarians and, therefore, were also the most consistent supporters of women's rights.
The Jacobs' move to Rochester coincided with her brother John's hiring by the abolitionists' Anti-Slavery Office and Reading Room. Jacobs stayed with her brother's friends, Isaac and Amy Post, frequent hosts to executive sessions of the Western New York State Anti-Slavery Society. A major feature of their work in the winter of 1849 was mounting protests against school segregation. At the time, the threat of a national compromise over slavery also loomed, as abolitionists countered pro-slavery arguments against expanding slavery to territories seized in the 1848 Mexican War. Nonetheless, Congress passed the Compromise of 1850, which maintained slavery in these areas. Measures included a more brutal version of the Fugitive Slave Law, which made it a crime for federal marshals not to arrest an alleged runaway slave and for anybody to assist a runaway, while also denying a suspected runaway any legal rights.
Amid this climate, Jacobs finally got her freedom when her close friend and employer negotiated the purchase of her freedom for three hundred dollars. She concludes her autobiographical account a freedwoman. According to Yellin, the draft text ended with a tribute to John Brown, but Lydia Maria Child, her editor, convinced Jacobs to drop it. Was this editorial measure a reflection of continuing debate among the pacifist Garrisonians over what course to take in the unfolding conflict?
It was certainly to Jacobs' credit, and an indication of her political allegiances, that she recognized the significance of Brown's October 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). In the battle that followed, Brown was wounded and ten of Brown's men—including two of his sons—were killed. Militarily defeated and hanged in punishment, Brown's political mission to destroy slavery by force of arms was spectacularly brought to conclusion by more than 200,000 freed slaves who fought in the Civil War.
At the outset, the "war between the states" was being fought only to "preserve the Union," and President Abraham Lincoln only opposed the extension of slavery. Karl Marx understood that the Civil War was at root a "conflict between the system of slavery and the system of free labor." Abolitionists sought to transform the war into a war of emancipation. Frederick Douglass insisted: "Let the slaves and free colored people be called into service, and formed into a liberating army, to march into the South and raise the banner of Emancipation among the slaves." It took two years of ignominious defeats led by politically unreliable Union Army generals to convince Lincoln of the necessity of freeing the slaves. After it became clear that the North could not win in any other way, he declared on 22 September 1862 all slaves in the Confederacy would be free on the first of January, 1863. Almost as important as freedom itself was the government's decision to form regiments of black soldiers. About 180,000 black soldiers served in the Union Army and as many as 29,000 men joined the Union Navy. This helped to turn the tide of battle. The Civil War and Reconstruction broke the class power of the slave South. It was the last great bourgeois revolution, the second American Revolution; the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were the legal codification of the revolutionary gains won at riflepoint by the interracial Union Army. The war and its aftermath ushered in the most democratic period for black people in U.S. history, underlining that a truly egalitarian radical vision of social reconstruction ultimately could not be fulfilled by a capitalist ruling class.
Civil War Years
Harriet Jacobs' role in the anti-slavery struggles and in the emerging Freedmen's Bureau was that of a political field worker. In October 1861, after Union General William Tecumseh Sherman led his troops in an attack on Confederate Fort Walker on Hilton Head Island, a decisive step was made in the Civil War. Sherman's army drew behind it hundreds of former slaves who set up camps on the Sea Islands along the Carolina Coast. Union authorities set up a Department of the South, taking over some 195 plantations, employing 10,000 former slaves to raise cotton and auctioning land off to Northerners and a few freedmen with a bit of money.
Sherman's occupation of Port Royal, South Carolina, became a starting point for the abolitionists and slaves to work together on Southern terrain. Historians have called this "Port Royal Experiment" a "dress rehearsal for Reconstruction." As W.E.B. DuBois later observed in Black Reconstruction in America (Atheneum, 1983): "The Negroes were willing to work and did work, but they wanted land to work, and they wanted to see and own the results of their toil. It was here and in the West and the South that a new vista opened. Here was a chance to establish an agrarian democracy in the South." It became clear to Jacobs that it was in places like Port Royal that the future of her people would be determined. She looked at reports from Port Royal and turned her eyes toward Washington. In the spring of 1862, Lincoln had not yet issued his Emancipation Proclamation, but in states that remained loyal to the Union, Congress had designated as "contrabands of war" any men, women and children escaping from Southern masters.
Jacobs' moving report of "Life Among the Contrabands," printed in the Liberator, details the chaos among these "refugees." She spent the spring and summer in Washington, setting up hospitals with the newly established Freedmen's Association. Her work often entailed a struggle against the civilian and military hierarchy in the refugee camps. The government-appointed superintendent of "contrabands" registered and hired people out as workers, with little attention to their needs. Jacobs spent her mornings in a small ground-floor room where "men, women and children lie here together, without a shadow of those rites which we give to our poorest dead. There they lie, in the filthy rags they wore from the plantation. Nobody seems to give it a thought. It is an everyday occurrence, and the scenes have become familiar."
Later that year, she moved to Union-occupied Alexandria and while distributing supplies of clothing and food, Jacobs began to envision a sustained mission. She would produce several letters over the next four years of work, articulating the freedmen's dreams for equality, land, education, jobs and housing. In lengthy letters to Lydia Maria Child she reported what she'd seen of black life, confident her writings would be printed in the abolitionist press. With Alexandria under Union occupation the people still suffered humiliations: "In return for their kindness and ever-ready service, they often receive insults, and sometimes beatings, and so they have learned to distrust those who wear the uniform of the U.S.," she notes. And, allowing herself a moment of outrage: "Oh, when will the white man learn to know the hearts of my abused and suffering people!" By midsummer, the federal superintendent in Alexandria was replaced, with improvements instigated from her collaboration with the Freedmen's Association.
In the summer of 1864. as Union Armies drew closer to taking Richmond, black "refugees" were drafted in response to threats on Alexandria, joining Union forces to defend the city against the Confederacy. Jacobs and her daughter Louisa organized the first commemoration of British West Indian Emancipation, featuring the presentation of a flag to the Colored Hospital— named L'Ouverture for the Haitian liberator—that had recently opened as a receiving place for the Colored Division of the Ninth Army Corps. She presented the flag to the surgeon in chief, addressing herself to black men in Union blues:
"Soldiers, what we have got came through the strength and valor of your right arms. Three years ago this flag had no significance for you, we could not cherish it as our emblem of freedom. You then had not part in the bloody struggle for your country, your patriotism was spurned; but to-day you are in arms for the freedom of your race and the defence of your country—to-day this flag is significant to you. Soldiers you have made it the symbol of freedom for the slave."
The Alexandria celebration was among many commemorations at which black fighters began to forge a sense of struggle not only for an end to slavery, but also to claim equal rights as American citizens.
Through the remaining days of the war, Jacobs volunteered in Alexandria as a visiting relief worker in the camp and in the hospitals. Freedmen there had already begun building a school and meetinghouse, which she pushed to find funding for at the first congress of the Women's National Loyal League. Jacobs coordinated aid with the goal of opening a free school under black leadership, volunteering her daughter Louisa and Virginia Lawton, the daughter of old Boston friends, as two "colored teachers." Jacobs School's doors opened to seventy-five students in January 1864. Given her name recognition among readers of Incidents, the school was featured in the reform press, with Alexandria becoming a regular stop on tours of the conquered South. A photo of Jacobs among her charges was carefully taken to publicize the ability of former slaves to become exemplary citizens. At the time, the photo hung prominently in the offices of the Frcedman's Record, By the end of March 1865, Congress established the Freedmen's Bureau, putting it in charge of relief and oversight for former slaves in the South.
Radical Reconstruction Overturned
Harriet and Louisa Jacobs later went to Savannah, where, Yellin notes, "both control of the schools and control of the land were at stake." Against local government resistance, they opened the Lincoln School, a black-run institution, and attempted to set up an orphanage and home for the elderly. Military rule ended just before Jacobs and her daughter arrived and, though posing as a protector, the Union Army also would be wielded to aid the city's powerful elite and stymie black efforts at freedom. The land question features in many of Jacobs' dispatches because the land with freedmen's settlements where schools were located was soon turned over to their old masters. Louisa's Lincoln School survived, but by January 1866, all freedmen were ordered to sign contracts for their labor.
The brief labor contracts, Jacobs wrote, "are very unjust. They are not allowed to have a boat or musket. They are not allowed to own a horse, cow, or pig. Many of them already own them, but must sell them if they remain on the plantations." The black population was disarmed. Backed by the Freedmen's Bureau, "free labor" meant that most blacks worked in cotton production, suffering working conditions akin to slave exploitation of prewar years. In exchange for backbreaking field work, the freedmen gave the former masters two-thirds of the crop, kept a third, then saw rations and rent deducted, resulting in a cycle of debt bondage.
However, Reconstruction posed a possibility of socially revolutionary transformations in the South: the regional ruling class, based on land and slaves, had been militarily defeated; under the occupying Northern power, black men and women, formerly slaves, exercised political rights for the first time in the South. Before the defeat of Reconstruction, many political offices in the South were held by black men.
Reconstruction not only brought about voting rights for black men and even many poor illiterate Southern white men but also ushered in the establishment of the South's first public schools, liberalized the South's barbaric penal code and reformed the planters' property tax system. These measures allowed for real prospects for schooling, land and jobs for black freedmen. But northern capitalists betrayed the promise of Reconstruction, allowing it to be physically smashed, aided by forces such as the Ku Klux Klan. In 1877, the last of the Union troops were withdrawn from Southern occupation, marking a compromise that put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House. From this defeat of Reconstruction grew the postwar Southern system of sharecropping, poll taxes, chain gangs, lynch law and "separate but equal"—i.e., unequal—Jim Crow facilities.
During Reconstruction, Jacobs and other female abolitionists working as teachers risked their lives to participate in freeing black people from the chains of bondage—their fight for free quality education was put front and center. But the sharpest debate raged over the question of land ownership. Freedmen and destitute white Unionist Southerners wanted the secessionists' estates confiscated, as at Port Royal, and distributed to them. Triumphant Northern rulers, however, would not permit an attack on "property rights," particularly as Northerners and Northern banks were grabbing up a good deal of Southern property. Intensive exploitation of black agricultural labor was allowed as the only way to rebuild the Southern economy, rather than industrial development or capital investment in modernization of agriculture.
This failure and betrayal of Reconstruction perpetuated the oppression of blacks as a color caste at the bottom of American capitalist society. This racial division, with whites on top of blacks, has been and continues to be the main historical obstacle to the development of political class consciousness among the American proletariat. It will take a third American Revolution, led by a multiracial workers party against capitalism itself, to break the fetters on blacks, women and all the oppressed.
Jacobs served with valor in the anti-slavery battles through Radical Reconstruction, but her story also fell victim to its defeat. At the time of her death in 1897, her name was barely remembered in the Boston abolitionist circles she once frequented. Even in her obituary, the Jacobs School and her relief work during the Civil War and Reconstruction were completely omitted. As the years passed, the memory of Jacobs faded and photos and records of her Alexandria school were lost. Even her book came to be seen as Child's.
Anyone who has ever wondered how black people managed to struggle and survive the hideous tortures meted out during slavery and afterward would gain a lot from reading these books. They offer inspiration to a new generation of fighters facing the daunting task of toppling the dominance of capitalist exploitation and sexual oppression today. Though the Civil War smashed slavery, the dreams of men and women like Jacobs remain to be realized. Finish the Civil War—For black liberation in a workers'America!
Monday, November 08, 2004
*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Alexandra Kollontai
Click on title to link to the Alexandra Kollontai Internet Archives for the works of 1917 Bolshevik secondary revolutionary leader Alexandra Kollantai. No revolution can succeed without men and women of Kollontai's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, still holds today.
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