The Sexualization of Politics and The Work of White Supremacy
In order to end these 6 weeks, I decided to write my final blog on the issues that came about when the black men and women were finally free. This section focuses on the interactions between whites and blacks and the idea to keep the two separated. The whites continued to make comments about “social equality” in a mocking tone. They were not ready for African Americans to be free and equal. The steps to making them free were large, but after that, they went back to small, child like steps. There were huge issues with white women and black men and the idea even would cause Klan raids. The Ku Klux Klan was large and thriving during this time and the articles of this section discuss those issues.
In the first article, I read about a Supreme Court case involving a former Klan member and a Democrat from Mississippi. The former Klan member seemed sad in his testimony. He wasn’t proud of hurting the men and women that he hurt, but he followed the rules of his leader. He joined with the intentions of following someone and their ideas. In some situations, he didn’t even know why he was hurting the men. The man from Mississippi spoke about why he thinks these Klan members act the way that they do. He thinks that the poor white Americans were worried that by giving blacks freedom, we were giving them an opportunity to rise above the white man. They were worried about being taken over by those they still saw as slaves. The biggest fear, he believed, is that by giving them power, the poor whites thought that the blacks would begin to try to marry their white women.
In the second case, Jourdan Ware, a former slave, became extremely successful in his farming. He was beaten by Klan members and discussed the issues with the Senate. They beat him and told him he needed to leave his land immediately. They told him he would never be allowed to vote and that he shouldn’t feel like he deserved that opportunity. They claimed the reason they did it was because Ware insulted a white woman the day before they had beat him. After the trials, Ware ended up being beaten to death by the Klan in the following days.
I honestly can’t imagine a time when so much hate was accepted by so many people. Where does this come from? Who teaches their children to hate like that? I just don’t understand why someone would be so angry. I think that there are a lot of terrible things in this world and I think racism is one of them. Before we can ever make advances in our society, we have to be able to respect each other. I think that it is the same story played over again and again in this world. I would like to believe that this amount of hate and racism is gone from our country, but in the back of my mind I know it isn’t. I wonder if there will ever be a day that our children or grand children or great grandchildren will see love and respect among all people: white, black, asian, mexican, male, female, transgender, gay, straight. I hope that our world can make it to that point one day. Sadly, I doubt our generation will live to see it.
Filed under US History Summer 2010 | Comment (1)Gender and the Civil War
For this blog, I looked again at the women of this time and how they had an impact on the war from the homefront. I thought I would just read about women that supported their families and of course the occasional rebel, but I didn’t realize how much women longed to be apart of the war for the freedom of their country. In the opening remarks to this section, it talks about how women wished they were men and even pretended to be men in order to fight in the war. One woman even broke off her engagement because her fiance would not volunteer to fight. She proceeded to send him a skirt and women’s undergarments with a note that said “Wear these or fight.” These women were strong and proud and knew the importance of this fight for their future. Two women in particular were discussed in this piece.
Fanny Fern, or Sara Willis Parton, wrote editorials about the working women and relationships between husbands and wives for the New York Ledger. She was being paid $100 a week which was more than any editorial writer of the time, man or woman. Her article, “Soldiers’ Wives”, focuses on the heroism of the soldier and of the wife. First, she describes the life of a soldier: friends by his side, excitement day in and day out, praise for when he is successful, and any death is a noble one. The wife, on the other hand, might have friends around her and the luxuries of life, but she is left worrying every day. She is left with her imagination to take over her mind and her soul. She has to wake up everyday and check newspapers and listings of the dead to see if her husband’s name has made that list for the day. She refers to what these women do as the silent heroism and writes to assure that these women do have a written part of history also.
Gail Hamilton, or Mary Dodge, wrote for middle class religious magazines but reached out to a larger audience during the Civil War. She wanted to break free of her small array of viewers and broaden her horizons. Instead of focusing on wives as just soldiers’ wives, she gives them the identity of the farmer’s wife, the shoemaker’s wife, and the black smith’s wife. She identifies that there were more women than just Mrs. Adams or Mrs. Reed. She urges the women to step up and support the war. She wanted to see women stand strong and speak proud instead of hiding and being afraid. She also recognizes the women who play men and fight for their country. She was proud of these women and wanted others to be proud of them too.
I am extremely proud to be a woman when I read things like this. I think that our strength is in our passion a lot of the time. We see strong women everyday that simply get looked past because they are a woman. I think that it is encouraging to see women that spoke up and urged other women to be proud during this time instead of seeing the women that speak up to play the victim. These two women wrote because they knew that people would read. They knew that by calling the women of colonial America up and urging them to be strong and proud, that they would get some kind of reaction. The fact that Fanny Fern made more money than any man or woman columnist of the time is amazing! It gives me hope that one day, it won’t matter if you are black or white, if you are male or female, one day we’ll all be looked at as just a person. I think it is pretty amazing that I can get inspiration from works and people from the earliest days of our nation.
Filed under US History Summer 2010 | Comments (4)New Freedoms: Abolitionism, Colonization, and Woman’s Rights
During the colonial times, women were far from being treated as equal. In fact, in some situations women considered themselves slaves to society and compared themselves to the actual slaves they saw in the colonies. In this section, I was able to read about different stories of colonization and women’s rights. In the first piece that I read, one African American man was trying to join the other free black men of the north to return to West Africa. The colonists had set up a ship that would take free blacks back to Africa to form their own colonies and start their lives again. In order to return to Africa, they had to present a certificate stating that they were free and also a letter that declared them of good character from a respectable white male. In this situation, there was a young black man who wanted to return to Africa with different men he had met from a job days before. The man in charge of the colonist movement wasn’t going to let him go until he stated his case. The free man explained that this move and these new opportunities would make a man out of him. His passion and his will to succeed ended up giving him the opportunity he sought out.
The next section was a song that described the struggles of free African Americans. During the time, colonization was trying to push the free blacks out of the country and only keep blacks that were enslaved. The abolitionists caught on to this trade and began to support the free blacks. If they were going to be free, they deserved to be free in these colonies too. The abolitionists felt as if the colonization movement was “anti-republican and anti-christian” and not fair to the free blacks. The song talks about how these men came and suffered and just wanted to be free. Once they were free, we were still trying to control their success in these colonies and these men did not deserve that. It is a small and humble warning that they will take their freedom but if we try to take it back, it will eventually not end well.
The last piece was about the rights of women. Two sisters from South Carolina that supported the anti-slavery movement began to speak to the masses about equality for all. At this time, it was inappropriate and wrong for a woman to be speaking out on such heavy topics and even worse to be doing it in a public setting. The first woman’s rights convention was held in 1838 and the fight still continues today. Even back then, these women struggled to have a voice and keep their voice once they got it. They had a place and expectations to fulfill in society and that involved keeping quiet in the community. Women had to give up anything left to them by their families to their husbands and ultimately became the property of their husband once they got married.
I think that all three of these pieces were interesting. Even when we gave slaves their freedom, we wanted to control them. We wanted to push them out of our country if they were not going to be controlled by the white man. Women were in the same boat! Women were expected to keep their mouths shut and submit to their husbands. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we expect people to all be the same and follow the same ideas? When will we start celebrating diversity and differences instead of punishing them? I think that it is interesting that we still struggle from a lot of the same issues that we had at the birth of our country.
Filed under US History Summer 2010 | Comments (6)Triscksters: Slave Folktales
For this week’s assignment, I read about the different tales that the slaves used to tell one another. Unlike stories passed on through generations in many different cultures, these stories were told to teach morale lessons. The stories didn’t focus on the good guy/bad guy complex and it wasn’t a touching story about how the under dog took over and was a hero. Most of the stories involved a trickster that complicated someone elses’ life in order to gain something for themself. In most of the stories, the teller will use personification to make animals appeal to humans and help teach the stories.
This section focused on four different stories, but there were two that really stuck out to me. The first story was a story about morales and how trickery could twist stories around. “De Rabbit, De Wolf, An’ De Tar Baby” was about a rabbit that used a wolf for his crops. Instead of planting his own crops to live off of, he would wait for the wolf to grow corn or peanuts and then he would eat them and save them for the winter. In order to keep the rabbit out of his crops, the wolf put up a scarecrow. The rabbit found it and simply knocked it over, took the crops, and left. The next day, the wolf made a “tar baby” to keep the rabbit out. That night, the rabbit returned and tried to kick down the “tar baby”. Instead of knocking it over and getting it out of the way, he got stuck to the tar and was left there all night. The next morning, the wolf came out and found the rabbit. The morale of the story, I expected, was to not steal from others. Like most of the other folktales from the slaves, the rabbit came back and tricked the wolf into tossing him back into his home. He said that he would be more scared to go back into the brush than to be killed by the wolf himself. The morale of the story was not to trust those who have done you wrong because they will just do it again.
On another side of the story telling, there were often tales about a slave named John and his master, Colonel Clemons. John always tricked his master but sometimes his master would catch him in his tricks. These stories were told more for entertainment but had to be kept quiet. If the white masters heard the slaves telling these stories, they might think that the slaves were planning something and punish them. In one story that was told, John would steal chickens from his master every Saturday and eat them for Sunday dinner. When the master realized the chickens kept disappearing, he assumed John was behind it. One Sunday, he came into John’s home and looked at his dinner to see what he was making. The slaves were only supposed to eat possum or cheap bacon that the master didn’t want. When Colonel Clemons looked in the pot of food being made, he found two of his chickens. John simply replied that when he put them in, they were possums but since they are chickens now, he’ll just have to throw them away. His wit and humor was something that the slaves could laugh at and enjoy.
I think that it is nice to see that the slaves could still keep pieces of their culture with them despite the terrible situation they were in. I think that these people were extremely strong and had a lot of courage. Their culture could have slowly died out in America, but it didn’t. They fought for themselves and believed that one day they would rise above all of this. I think it is amazing how determined they were to keep their families close and to keep their spirits high. I think that this drive and this appreciation for theis culture truly aided them into getting out of slavery in the long run.
Filed under US History Summer 2010 | Comments (5)Magic and Witchcraft Within European, Indian, and African Cultures
The Salem With Trials caused a lot of controversy during their time and are still discussed today. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote several pieces that are still popular today about the events leading up to the trials. The English Puritan’s told multiple stories that were passed down from generation to generation about their experiences with witchcraft. When we think about our history with witchcraft, the stories of the trials usually come to mind. Salem, Massachusetts holds the history of Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osbourne. Because of the trials, hundreds were accused of witchcraft, twenty were killed, and four more died while they were serving their time in jail.
The worst part about the trials was that people were accusing other people of witchcraft simply because they did not like them or because they had done something to them in the past. In most situations, the people accused were women. Rachel Clinton, for example, was accused multiple times of witchcraft. By simply walking away and cursing someone for not helping her, she was a suspect. When she interacted with different people, someone either was hurt or died a day later or hours later.
In a different side of witchcraft, people looked at the Native Americans and how they used different forms of magic, healing, and communication with spirits. They believed that by interacting with the spirits and calling on them for help that this would help save their people. Many of their religious practices were also believed to have set curses on people. This was a type of fear that people had and they worried that the different connections with the unknown could only hurt them in the end.
I think that the fears that people had for “witchcraft” have carried over into how we interact in our lives today. One great example was the fear of women. In most situations, the outspoken, different woman was the one that was accused of witchcraft. In these times, the women were expected to be care takers and to help keep the home a home. They were the protectors of the emotions of the families and were expected to follow their husband and do as they were told. The trials were a direct response to these different women. There needed to be an explanation for why they weren’t conforming and why they weren’t like everyone else. I think that powerful women still intimidate men in today’s society. I think that we need to learn how to accept people’s differences instead of questioning them. Diversity is beautiful and I think that the different “magical” practices from around the world and throughout history are an interesting part of our history.
Filed under US History Summer 2010 | Comments (2)