Well, Wanda S. blocked me for asking her to provide evidence of some of the assertions that she made. My questions were all respectful but also not accepting of casting aspersions without actual evidence. To date I have seen zero evidence that suffragettes worked against Black women having the vote and there is tons of evidence to the contrary - despite some prioritization of the feelings and needs of upper and middle class white women.

There was an anti-suffrage women's group know as the "the cult of true womanhood" who believed that white women were the only "true" women because they took care of home and hearth and did not have to labor like Black women (considered manly) - kind of silly since all but the richest white women still had to do a lot of actual hard labor in the home. It was simply a convenient narrative to justify their racism.

Sojourner Truth's famous speech, "Ain't I a woman" addresses this group (something that was actually brought to my attention in a link that Wanda sent me.) It was not speaking to suffragettes (as she was sure it was), it was quite clearly speaking to anti-suffragists who believed that women were morally pure when they held the home and family together and that no further rights were necessary - kind of sounds like Phyllis Shlafly to me.

I'm sorry that Wanda took my questions as an attack, something they were absolutely not meant as, but if there is anything I stand for, it's dispelling cultural narratives that have no basis in fact. I said repeatedly that I was open to changing my point of view if some actual evidence was presented. It never was.

For whatever reason, there's a strong narrative that Anthony and Stanton were actually virulent racists, that suffragettes didn't want Black women to vote, and other things that have no actual basis in reality. That doesn't mean that feminism hasn't been white centric and doesn't have room for improvement, but I believe that true social justice means holding people responsible for the things they actually did and not for things that they didn't.

I honestly think there's some sort of "divide and conquer" thing going on here where patriarchal forces don't want feminists and Blacks to get too chummy because that threatens the power structures. Clearly, there are some real problems with white centric feminism that are real, but inventing these false narratives that are just full of outright lies, to the point where they have seeped into some mainstream publications is just sort of insidious.