The Trouble with White Women by Kyla Schuller

Author:Kyla Schuller [Schuller, Kyla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

One hundred years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped launch white feminism, intersectional feminists kept developing agendas to interrogate multiple structures of power at once. In the 1940s, Dr. Ferebee and other members of the Negro Project’s advisory council embraced a multipronged approach to bringing birth control to Black communities that was separate from their work with Sanger. They understood that for Black women living within a nation where eugenic ideas gripped even civil rights leaders like Du Bois, reproductive freedom must extend beyond the ability to prevent pregnancy—it must also defend the right of all women to have children.

Under Dr. Ferebee’s and Mary McLeod Bethune’s leadership, in 1941 the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) passed a resolution recommending that every Black civil rights organization in the country incorporate contraception into its health outreach work. This was years before most white women’s clubs would publicly support birth control; NCNW became the first national organization to incorporate family planning into its agenda. The NCNW newsletter reprinted both the resolution in full and Dr. Ferebee’s speech to Planned Parenthood in its entirety, reflecting the importance of this work to their mission. McLeod Bethune and Ferebee had an expansive view of voluntary motherhood. Family planning, the resolution announces, “aims to aid each family to have all the children it can support and afford, but no more.”65 The italics make it plain: the National Council of Negro Women wasn’t recommending anything like sterilization or denying women the opportunity to birth children. They were supporting the right of poor women to have children in the first place. Their recommendation stopped short of complete reproductive self-determination, however—the firm “no more” raises as many questions as it answers. Yet overall, the resolution is a significant step away from a single-minded focus on preventing pregnancy and toward broader reproductive justice.

Today, the reproductive justice movement launched by Loretta Ross and other Black feminist activists in 1994 fights on three fronts, rather than on the single axis of pregnancy prevention and termination. Its first principle stems from the pro-choice movement Sanger inaugurated: the right not to have children, via contraception, abortion, or abstinence. The second and third principles echo the approach Dr. Ferebee anticipated: the right to have children and the right to parent the children in safe and healthy environments, involving agendas that tackle white supremacy, economic inequality, sexual abuse, environmental racism, mass incarceration, queer and trans marginalization, and related structures of power.66 The movement fights structural inequalities that harm reproduction at all life stages.

Sanger’s association with the pro-choice agenda thus presents us with an opportunity. Fully confronting Sanger’s white feminism enables us to move away from the reproductive choice movement, of which she is the founder and remains its leading hero, and toward the reproductive justice movement. The key takeaway from Sanger’s career for intersectional feminists today is not only her appalling insistence that children varied in their quality and thus value to the nation, but also her underlying political framework: that progress pivots on one axis. Sanger

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