White women

“ The examples of valor and virtue on which their minds are fed are exclusively white examples. What wonder, then, that each generation comes to maturity with the idea imbedded in its mind that only white men are valorous and fit to rule and only white women are virtuous and entitled to chivalry, respect and protection? What wonder that they think, almost instinctively, that the Negro’s proper place, nationally and internationally, is that of an inferior? It is only what we should naturally expect. ”

“ There are a very few instances where white women, who, are abandoned to all respect for the popular sense of propriety of their own sex and race, that have cohabited with black men; and also where giddy white girls have been decoyed into matrimonial alliances with them, through the illusion of a delusive feeling of romance ”

“ First, while all women are oppressed by all men, cutting across class and national lines, the principal oppression of black and brown women is their oppression as black or brown people. Thus, before there can be unity among all women, black, brown and white, in the struggle against male supremacy, white women have to establish as a first principle of unity the struggle against white supremacy and the repudiation of the white-skin privilege. ”

“ In America, walking out with Negroes either innocently or otherwise is impossible. Riots and lynchings do not arise from that reason, but from alleged individual assaults upon white women. It should be remarked that womanhood in America is practically idealized. The public as a whole is disinclined to tolerate a woman smoking or drinking, or bathing in inadequate attire, or even “spooning.” It would not occur to a poor white factory girl as even possible to walk out with a Negro. ”

“ No other women on earth could have emerged from the hell of force and temptation which once engulfed and still surrounds black women in America with half the modesty and womanliness that they retain. I have always felt like bowing myself before them in all abasement, searching to bring some tribute to these long-suffering victims, these burdened sisters of mine, whom the world, the wise, white world, loves to affront and ridicule and wantonly to insult. ”

“ Then there before their eyes rose the Paradise tree of the forbidden fruit—the white women beyond their reach. There was in every State the law against intermarriage of the white and black races which stood and will stand in Median and Persian unchangeableness. ”

“ When one considers how these women had spent the best part of their lives in working for the freedom of the negro, their humiliation can be imagined at seeing educated colored men laboring with might and main to prevent white women from obtaining the same privileges which they were asking for themselves. It was a bitter dose and one which women have been compelled to take in every State where a campaign for woman suffrage has been made. ”

“ So, I say, let the white women get busy and teach morality and respect to their own, and we shall see how that will work out. As for illegitimate children, the bearing of these is not confined to women of the Negro race by any means. The white infant asylums will give ample proof of this. We know full well that a white man may not marry a colored girl in the South, but we wonder just why it is he does not marry the white girl whom he seduces? ”

“ But the negro women of the South are subject to temptations, of which their white sisters of the North have no appreciation, and which come to them from the days of their race enslavement. They are still the victims of the white man under a survival of a system tacitly recognized, which deprives them [7] of the sympathy and help of the Southern white women, and to meet such temptations the negro woman can only offer the resistance of a low moral standard, an inheritance from the system of slavery, made still lower from a life-long residence in a one-roomed cabin. ”

“ From this inevitable conclusion and consequence there is no possible escape. But the white women of the South are powerless to lift the morals of their men without lifting at the same time the morals of the women of the black race. ”

“ The class of white women who were required to work in the fields belonged to the lowest rank in point of character. Not having been born in Virginia and not having thus acquired from birth a repugnance to association with the Africans upon a footing of social equality, they yielded to the temptations of the situations in which they were placed. The offence, whether committed by a native or an imported white woman, was an act of personal degradation that was condemned by public sentiment with as much severity in the seventeenth century as at all subsequent periods.... ”

“ Will they drag down the assumed superior race, while they tend to build up the other race? Will such marriages offend the race prejudices alike of the black and white races? Or will such marriages be pleasing to the one race and displeasing to the other? Will not the violation of race prejudices by such marriages occasion unhappiness, and is there any advantage to the State to compensate the misery? What has been the result of the marriages of white women with negro men on the happiness of the wives and their offspring? ”

“ Have you noticed in Washington—or anywhere in the South—that a negro is always seen with a girl at least one shade whiter than himself? The same instinct to rise, to get closer to the standard of the white man, whom they slavishly admire, is in the women as well as in the men. They are the weaker sex and must submit to Circumstance, but they would sacrifice the whole race for marriage with a white man. If you had left this girl to her fate, she would have gone to the devil, for a woman as white as that would have starved rather than marry a negro. ”

“ The trials of the war were nothing compared to the ordeal through which Southern women have just passed. In the wreck of the South brought on by Northern ballots and bayonets, the culminating damage is the demoralization of the generation of negroes now recently grown. In the face of the worse than Gorgan horrors our women have borne themselves with a courage, a patience, and fortitude that are sublime. But let friends of the negro and friends of our women hope. Thank God, the crime is on the decrease. White men somehow will protect such women as God has given our sunny land. ”

“ Young colored hoodlums of both sexes, adept at mugging and knifing, prey on strangers. The white man who comes here for pastime will find his luck all bad. The best he can hope for is a beating and maiming. But white women who are known to be Negro lovers are given safe conduct by the men, though they are attacked often by Negro women who resent the intrusion. These streets are barely patrolled by police. ”

“ Native women are remarkably like white women. They look upon marriage as their proper and natural function in life, but they are not all of them willing to marry according to parental instructions; there is the same proportion of self-willed damsels among them as among the whites, who by obdurately refusing to enter into the marriages arranged for them cause pain and trouble to their well-meaning parents. ”

“ Indeed, the greater portion of the colored women, in the days of slavery, had no greater aspiration than that of becoming the finely-dressed mistress of some white man. Although freedom has brought about a new order of things, and our colored women are making rapid strides to rise above the dark scenes of the past, yet the want of protection to our people since the old-time whites have regained power, places a large number of the colored young women of the cities and towns at the mercy of bad colored men, or worse white men. ”

“ Hundreds of such cases might be cited, but enough have been given to prove the assertion that there are white women in the South who love the Afro-American's company even as there are white men notorious for their preference for Afro-American women. ”

“ So it appears that the theory of State's rights is only invoked when women plead at the bar of justice for that voice in their Government to which all those who submit to authority are entitled. Now, as to the negro problem. We southern women feel that the time has come to lay once and for all this old, old ghost that stalks through the halls of Congress. It is a phantom as applied to woman suf- frage. In fifteen States south of the Mason and Dixon line there are over a million more white women than negro men and women combined. There are only two States in which the negro race pre- dominates. ”

“ Yet the same women in cotton gowns and bandana headgear might look far from unpleasing. No doubt the like uneasy sense of humiliation besets one on seeing white women decked in finery unsuited to their age or their contours. But that does not alter the fact that the urban negro of either sex, when he or she indulges in extremes of European adornment, is a spectacle highly disturbing to Caucasian self-complacency. Caricature is none the more agreeable for being, in a certain sense, just. ”

“ Much was said of the superiority of man’s intellect, the general helplessness of women and their need for courtesy, the sin of Eve, etc. Most of the white women, being “perfect ladies,” according to the ideals of the time, were not used to speaking in public and finally to their dismay the black woman arose from the corner. ”

“ It is no ground for surprise that in the seventeenth century there were instances of criminal intimacy between white women and negroes. Many of the former had only recently arrived from England, and were, therefore, comparatively free from the race prejudice that was so likely to develop upon close association with the African for a great length of time. ”

“ With regard to Negro men seeking to marry white women, it is untrue of the masses. Nearly all of our men are satisfied to marry the women of the race to which they belong. We have women as good and as pure and as beautiful as any other race; and, as to variety, we excel them.
“I state it as my opinion that the solution of the so-called Negro Problem does not depend upon emigration, amalgamation nor colonization. ”

“ Worden are not faddists. They are earnestly and steadfastly endeavoring to fulfill the trust committed to them, to develop their children into strong healthy women, to strengthen their powers of endurance, and develop their physical faculties by bringing them up in accordance with all the laws of health.”
Another thing that I would have white women learn from their Indian sisters, is a thing they used to know but are rapidly forgetting. That is, the joy of suckling their own children. An Indian mother that does not suckle her own child is almost unknown. ”

“ The very attempt to do this in the case of Negro Americans has strangely over-reached itself. By so much as the defective eyesight of the white world rejects black women as beauties, by so much the more it needs them as human beings,—an enviable alternative, as many a white woman knows. ”

“ There is a soft, winning, captivating way about some of those girls that makes them perfectly resistible. I don't wonder at the envy, rage, and jealousy of our white women. They can't help being conscious of their own inferiority in these respects. ”

“ We have noted then the Negro woman in America as a worker tending to emancipate all women workers; as a mother nursing the white race and uniting the black and white race; as a conspirator urging forward emancipation in various sorts of ways; and we have finally only to remember that to-day the women of America who are doing humble but on the whole the most effective work in the social uplift of the lowly, not so much by money as by personal contact, are the colored women. ”

“ Did you never wonder whether he ever had loved at all?"
"You have made me wonder, to-night, whether, at some period of your life, you have not loved some woman of your own race and color. You must have had some opportunities of knowing white women."
"Very few. An' my pride was agin seekin' what I knew was not for me; for the woman I fancied to myself was no common white woman. White Rose, I carried a young man's heart in my bosom until I was near sixty, an' then I lost it." ”

“ To-day, the immigrants pouring in through the open gates of our seaport towns, the Indian when settled in severalty, the negro hardly emancipated from the degradation of two hundred years of slavery,—may all share in the sovereignty of the State. The white woman,—the woman in whose veins runs the blood of those heroic colonists who founded our country, of those women who helped to sustain the courage of their husbands in the Revolutionary War; the woman who may have given the flower of her youth and health in the service of our Civil War—that woman is excluded. ”

“ Speaking of buying and selling women among the Moros, reminds me of an old Maharajah in Bongao who had never seen an American woman until the arrival of the Burnside. Of course all white women are considered very beautiful by these dusky savages, an evidence of how much they admire Europeans being found in the fact that they firmly believe in the Sultan’s Seventh Heaven all the wives of his harem will have white skins. ”

“ The old lies are in our blood—we still believe in Eve and her shame. White men have fought in the past, and it remains for white women to fight now, and at last rid their sex all over the world of the ignominy of this false doctrine. ”

“ Are your white women all fools? Tell them we not only don’t need their pity, but we despise them for their habits of life that lead them to pity us. The Creator made us with the capacity and power for work. ”

“ There was an indisposition, as we have already seen, on the part of the planters to employ white women in agriculture, however great might be the demand for their assistance in the cultivation of tobacco at certain seasons, and it was only those individuals of the sex who were tarnished in reputation or slatternly in habits who were found engaged in this way. This discrimination between female servants and female slaves has been attributed to various causes. By some, it is thought to have been due to a desire in the colonial authorities to discourage the importation of negroes. ”