In Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore focuses on the black middle class prior to 1920. The subjects of her study “were men and women who had forgotten neither their families’ enslavement nor their own struggles for an education. They unabashedly believed that they were setting the best example for other African Americans to follow, and they aimed to help the less fortunate along” (pg. xix). Her argument is multifaceted. In her first section, she argues, “Racial repression at the turn of the century did not simply institutionalize the prevailing trend in race relations; rather, it profoundly reordered society” (pg. xx). She continues, “The white supremacists responded to growing assertiveness among white women, to urban and industrial social pressures, and the spectacular African American successes” (pg. xx). Following this, “African American resistance to the rising tide of white supremacy, revealing a black political milieu infinitely more varied than the binary construction of black resistance around the oppositional poles of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois” (pg. xx). Later, “After disfranchisement of black men, black women became diplomats to the white community” (pg. xxi). Gilmore concludes, “Women suffrage forever altered white supremacy’s style and cleared a narrow path for black men to return to electoral politics” (pg. xxi).
Describing the Jim Crow South, Gilmore writes, “Southerners lived under a caste system in which skin color, class, and gender dictated the pattern of every daily interaction” (pg. 3). Conversely, “the first and second generation of freedwomen saw racial progress as inclusive, not exclusive, of those less fortunate” (pg. 4). Discussing the intersection between race and gender, Gilmore writes, “By the time black female children first encountered sexism, they were armed with an ideological paradigm: racism is wrong; therefore sexism is wrong” (pg. 20). Gilmore argues that education prepared women with the skills necessary to play an active role in the world. Further, she counters the current view of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union as racist, arguing that it played a key role for women in the South in fostering interracial cooperation based on shared gender and class situations. In education, Gilmore writes, “Unlike white women of the period, black women did not usually have to choose between higher education and marriage or between teaching and marrying” (pg. 43). Conversely, men increasingly tied notions of gender to race, resulting in the concepts of the Black Best Man and the New White Man, both of whom sought to represent the ideal masculine figure of their race and curtail interracial sex.
Of the white supremacy campaigns in the 1890s, Gilmore argues that historians have overlooked women’s involvement. She writes, “The Democrats’ campaign depended in large part upon white women’s cooperation. On the one hand, it objectified women and portrayed them as helpless; on the other, it celebrated their involvement” (pg. 92-93). In the case of black women, Gilmore writes, “Although, in fact, black women did cleave to a common political culture, one that privileged communitarianism over individualism, their tactics – how they voiced their beliefs and the forums in which they chose to act – depended on their class, their age, and the centrality of gender to their thinking” (pg. 93). Later, “after disenfranchisement, however, the political culture black women had created through thirty years of work in temperance organizations, Republican Party aid societies, and churches furnished both an ideological basis and an organizational structure from which black women could take on those tasks” (pg. 147-148). Black women used the authority of female moral suasion couple with progressivism – different from white women’s progressivism – to at in the political and public spheres. Race likewise played a key role in women’s suffrage. Gilmore writes, “Those white women who opposed their own enfranchisement took up race as a cudgel to attempt to win their fight. Before it was over, all white women – suffragists and antisuffragists alike – developed new political styles that took race into account” (pg. 203). ( )