The Modern World-System IV by Wallerstein Immanuel

Author:Wallerstein, Immanuel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

ETHNIC AND RACIAL MOVEMENTS

We have seen that the social/labor movements had great difficulty in accepting the legitimacy of the feminist/women's movements in their demands for the rights of active citizenship. In a similar manner, the feminist/women's movements had great difficulties in accepting the legitimacy of the ethnic/racial movements in the latter's demands for the rights of active citizenship. It was as though there weren't enough room on the ship to accommodate everyone. Or perhaps the better metaphor is an unwillingness to accept the idea of a one-class ship—citizens all, citizens equal. In the nineteenth century, this second organizational conflict was to be found primarily in the United States, where the oppression of the Blacks played such a central role in political tensions and therefore gave rise to Black social movements. The struggle for Irish rights in Great Britain posed a parallel issue, except that it included a demand for political separation that was largely absent in the case of the Blacks in the United States.

From the point of view of the dominant strata, the issue of women's rights and that of rights for Blacks (and indeed for other ethnic “minorities”) were not fundamentally different. Indeed, it often seemed that they fused the perceptions:

Republican gender ideology eased the development of a racialized citizenship. Gender ideology opposed manhood to womanhood, fastening manhood to productivity and independence and womanhood to servility and dependence….By assigning feminine traits to ethnic men, old-stock Americans not only neutered allegedly servile and dependent men but marked them as a peril to republican liberty as well….The flip side of dependent womanhood was virtuous motherhood; the flip side of dependent manhood was the germ of tyranny. (Mink, 1990, 96)

In the early nineteenth century, women were quite active in the abolitionist movements, especially in Great Britain and the United States. It was a period in which women's rights were deteriorating everywhere—in the case of the United States, “dramatically” (Berg, 1978, 11). It should be remembered that the first formal exclusion of women from the vote was in the British Reform Bill of 1832, which was intended to enfranchise some who did not have the franchise before. But in doing this, the bill specified “male persons,” a phrase that had never before been found in English legislation. This phrase “provided a focus of attack and a source of resentment,” (Rover, 1967, 3) out of which British feminism would grow.103

Women turned quite pointedly to the concept of “natural rights,” which was the legacy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, in order to lay claim to their freedom. Abolitionism was also based on the concept of “natural rights,” and the abolitionist movement “served as a catalyst which transformed latent feminist sentiment into the beginnings of an organized movement” (Hersh, 1978, 1). Abolition, of course, involved the ending of slavery, and thus the entry into formal citizenship of those who had been slaves. But since, as we have seen, there were de facto two levels of citizens, the active and the passive, the immediate question was into which of the two categories the liberated slaves would be placed.

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