Race vs. Gender:  Women’s Struggle for Racial Equality
Matt Goerss
Memphis Historical Book Review

 

            If asked to name a female leader of the civil rights movement, most Americans would likely think first of Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus in 1955 sparked one of the first major campaigns of the movement.  Aside from Parks, however, Americans are likely to associate the civil rights movement with its male leaders, such as Martin Luther King, Jr.  In the introduction to her book Freedom’s Daughters:  The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970, historian Lynne Olson notes that women were completely excluded from the prominent events of the March of Washington in 1963, one of the pinnacle events of the movement—no women addressed the crowd, and no women met with President Kennedy.[1]  Despite their exclusion from the most public events of the civil rights movement, women, both black and white, served without recognition as the backbone of the struggle for racial equality in the United States.  In Freedom’s Daughters, Olson uncovers the stories of these “unsung heroines” while also giving ample consideration to the tensions of race and gender that both united black and white women in the struggle for equality and divided them at the same time.  Indeed, Olson’s vivid examples of black and white female activists accurately depict the delicate balance between fighting for racial and gender equality that black women maintained throughout the civil rights movement.

            Olson makes three principal assertions in the preface of Freedom’s Daughters that guide her discussion throughout the rest of the book.  First, she argues that the involvement of women in the struggle for racial equality began well before the Civil War, and the efforts of both slave and free women contributed to the activism of women in the civil rights movement.  Second, she asserts that at every turn, the women who fought for civil rights balanced their roles as activists with their roles as wives and mothers and developed complex relationships with the men involved in the movement.  Finally, she argues that the complexities of gender and race created tensions between the black and white women who worked for civil rights, which at times impeded the progress of the movement as black women were forced to choose between siding with black men for racial equality and white women for gender equality (p. 15-16).  Olson’s main arguments set up the rest of her book as a story not only of the racial tensions that defined the civil rights movement, but also the gender and class tensions that are often ignored when evaluating the successes and failures of the struggle for racial equality.  In that sense, Olson places her work properly within the context of the 1950s and 1960s, during which issues of race could rarely be separated from issues of class and gender.

            To support her argument, Olson discusses in detail the stories of women who worked largely in obscurity to fight for equal rights for African Americans.  In the opening chapters of the book, Olson discusses the complex relationship between slave women, white women, and white men that existed in the South prior to the Civil War.  To illustrate her point, she tells the story of the grandmother of Pauli Murray, a prominent female activist in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  Murray’s grandmother was born as the result of her great-grandmother being raped by a white man, and Olson uses this situation as an example of the elaborate social system that existed in the antebellum South.  In particular, Olson notes that while white women were above slave women in Southern society, in reality both black and white women were completely subservient to men—black women as sexual objects and white women as the “pure” servants to their husbands (p. 25-26).  Olson also discusses the disillusionment that many white female activists felt when the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments granted equality and voting rights to black men but not to any women (p. 31).  Thus, even in the context of the slave system, Olson supports her main argument by setting the stage for the conflicts between black and white women, as well as between female and male activists, that arose during the civil rights movement over one hundred years later.

            The stories of the “unsung heroines” of the civil rights movement that Olson uses to support her main argument are the strongest aspect of her work.  Olson weaves her main arguments through each of the women she introduces.  For example, she uses the stories of Laura McGhee and Ida Mae “Cat” Holland, two poor black women from Greenwood, Mississippi, to illustrate the hardships that female activists faced in balancing their activism and their roles as mothers and subordinates to men.  McGhee, a widow, raised three sons while teaching at a citizenship school and working to register voters in the Mississippi Delta.  As a property owner, she faced multiple challenges from whites who wanted to force her off of her land, and her activism resulted in one of her sons being arrested (p. 257-58).  Despite these difficulties, McGhee became a leader for young women in the Delta, influencing even former prostitutes like Holland.  Olson uses Holland to emphasize the relationships between male and female leaders in the movement, as Holland left behind her life of prostitution to become a secretary and canvasser for Bob Moses, one of the most notable male leaders of the movement in the Delta (p. 258).  While Holland did participate in public demonstrations, her role as an office worker serves as an example of how many black and white women contributed to the movement behind the scenes while men occupied more public roles.

            Olson also uses the experiences of women to illustrate the divisions between white and black women in the movement in a way that few historians consider in such a thorough manner.  She explains in detail how tensions between black and white women complicated the efforts of civil rights activists during Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964.  Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the most prominent black female activists in the movement, distrusted many of the white female activists from the North due to their lack of understanding of Southern culture (p. 305-06).  Casey Hayden, a white female activist involved with SNCC, found it difficult to interact with black activists who considered her to be only a secretary and not an integral part of the Freedom Summer effort.  In the end, Olson notes that the distrust between black and white women, as well as a lack of understanding of each other’s roles and efforts, limited the success of the Freedom Summer activism, as the divisions between black and white activists began to overshadow the fight for equality itself (p. 312-13).

            The greatest weakness in Freedom’s Daughters lies not in Olson’s argument and support of her thesis, but rather in the documentation of her sources.  Olson uses a wide variety of primary and secondary sources to defend her argument, and she relies heavily on interviews and first-hand accounts of women’s activism in published works.  She also draws from many prominent civil rights historians, such as Bayard Rustin and Howell Raines.  While it is clear that Olson has conducted thorough research on the involvement of women in the civil rights movement, she fails to document her sources in a manner that is easily accessible to historians and readers.  Olson cites her sources in an “Endnotes” section at the conclusion of the book.  Instead of using subscripts in the text, however, she quotes a part of a sentence in the endnotes section and then details the source from which the quote or information came.  This format makes it very difficult for the reader to match Olson’s evidence and sources together properly.  Olson also offers very little additional information in her endnotes, which do not lead the reader to additional sources if they would like to study a particular person or topic further.  While she likely used this citation format to appeal to a wider audience than just historians, Olson’s lack of thorough documentation of her sources limits the use of this book as a resource for information on women in the civil rights movement.  It does not, however, lessen the impact of her argument or her contribution to the historiography of the civil rights and women’s rights movements.

            Overall, Freedom’s Daughters serves as a valuable resource for historians and educators alike due to Olson’s detailed discussions of the women who worked behind the scenes to achieve equality for both African Americans and women.  At the same time, Olson’s writing style and storytelling ability make the book accessible to the general public in a way that many historical works are not.  Most powerful, though, is Olson’s thorough discussion of the forces of race and gender that often divided the women involved in the movement and impeded the progress of equal rights.  Many historical and popular writings on the women involved in the civil rights movement have focused only on the movement’s successes and its most notable female figures.  In Freedom’s Daughters, Olson brings the “unsung heroines” of the movement to life in a way that readers can identify with their struggles, yet she does not lose the themes of tension and competing causes that produced setbacks as well as victories.  The end result of Olson’s work is a true appreciation for how far equal rights progressed in the century after the Civil War, yet also an understanding of how much progress was still to be achieved at the end of the tumultuous decade of the 1960s.

           


[1] Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters:  The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York City:  Touchstone, 2001), 13.  All further citations will be included in the text.