People, Locations, Episodes

Black Women And International Women’s Day, a story

*On this date since 1910, the world formally celebrates International Women’s Day (IWD).  Since it’s beginning, IWD is a global celebration of women's wellness.  Starting at a time of great social turbulence and crisis, IWD inherited a tradition of protest and political activism.  Yet since its inception, there has been a pattern of racial exclusion of nonwhite women, specifically Black Women!

This article contains segments from an Opinion/Article written by Murphy Brown. The poem “The Strong Black Woman is Dead” was first e-mailed to me more than a decade ago, and since then, I have seen and heard it used in several places. I thought about this poem as we celebrated International Women’s Day on Saturday, March 8, 2008, billed as the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day.  According to an information sheet, I collected when I attended a brunch to recognize the historic occasion; “the event which gave birth to International Women’s Day” happened when “On March 8, 1908, 15,000 women marched through the streets of Manhattan, demanding the right to vote, but also their rights as working women: shorter hours, better pay and right to join a union.”

The story of International Women’s Day seems to be one of the European immigrant women in New York at the beginning of the 20th century. There is no mention of the countless enslaved African women who labored without pay in New York and across the United States of America. No mention of the enslaved African women whose unpaid labor enriched white people in Central, North, and South America, and Europe and their struggles for freedom. A white historian Gerda Lerner wrote in her book “Black Women in White America: A Documentary History” published in 1972, “the modern historian is dependent on the availability of sources. The kind of sources collected depends to a large extent on the interests, prejudices and values of the collectors, archivists and historians of an earlier day.” We have known that for many centuries as evidenced by the words of an ancient African proverb, “Until the lion has his historian the hunter will always be the hero.”

The contributions of Black women have been eliminated from the story of the women’s movement. In “Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images” published in 1978, African American historians Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Pen write; “Discrimination against Afro-American women reformers was the rule rather than the exception within the women’s rights movement from the 1830s to 1920.” They also comment that “Discrimination against black women in abolitionist societies organized by white women appears ironic when one considers that white women complained of discrimination by men.” When it came to working, enslaved African women were not discriminated against along gender lines. Frederick Law Olmsted wrote in “Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom,” published in 1861, “We stopped, for some time, on this plantation, near where some thirty men and women were at work, repairing the road. The women were in majority and were engaged in the same labor as the men; driving the carts, loading them with dirt, and dumping them upon the road; cutting down trees, and drawing wood by hand, to lay across the miry places; hoeing, and shoveling.”

In 1985, Jacqueline Jones also writes in “Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow” that enslaved African women did the same work as their male counterparts. “In the bayou region, women planted sugar cane cuttings, plowed, and helped to harvest and gin the cane. During the winter, they performed many tasks necessary on a 19th-century farm: repairing roads, pitching hay, burning brush, and setting up post and rail fences.” Despite the backbreaking chores enslaved women were forced to perform, they were also expected to bear and rear children, and sexual predators victimized them. Enslaved African women resisted in various ways, probably leading to the “Strong Black Woman” myth that many of us still try to make a reality.  Harriet Tubman, who transitioned on March 10, 1913, is one of our sheroes whose exploits have reached mythic proportions. She was a conductor on the Underground Railroad who made 19 trips into enemy territory and rescued more than 300 slaves despite a $40,000 bounty on her head. She also worked as a cook, nurse, and spy for the Union army during the American Civil War.

One of our lesser-known sheroes was Milla Granson, who resisted by educating her people. It was illegal for enslaved Africans to be literate, but not only did Milla Granson learn to read and write, but she also taught other enslaved Africans. Risking her life, she held classes in her cabin from 11:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. Holding classes of 12 students at a time, she taught hundreds of enslaved Africans to read and write. In Lerner’s Documentary History, under the heading “A Slave Woman Runs a Midnight School,” she informs us “a number of them wrote their passes and started for Canada.” Those strong black women resisted their enslavement by any means necessary.  After the abolition of chattel slavery in the United States (1865), the work available to African American women was reminiscent of the work they did during their enslavement. They worked as housekeepers, servants, laundresses, cooks, maids, and washerwomen.

There were some 1,017,000 African American domestic workers before the second European tribal warfare (World War II.) In the Southern states, most women were sharecroppers or agricultural wage laborers. Elizabeth R. Rose, in “A Mother’s Job: The History of Day Care, 1890-1960,” published in 1998, writes, “When African American women were employed in other industries, they were segregated into the dirtiest and most unpleasant part of the work.” The few who were “fortunate” to become employed as factory workers worked longer hours and made less than white women.

It is hardly likely that there were any African American women in the group of 15,000 factory workers who marched through the streets of Manhattan on March 8, 1908, because they would not have been “granted the privilege” of working in a factory in New York. Even though African women are not written into the history of the beginning of International Women’s Day, we have contributed to the women’s movement, and thankfully we have historians who write our stories.

The Combahee River Collective of the 1970s is yet another neglected episode that showcases the perseverance of women who are descendants of American slavery and Jim Crow segregation.  With the advent of the #metoo and Time’s Up movements and the work of Black women in the Alabama senatorial race in 2017 in America, an added Black emergence is clearly showing up. . . .again.

Finally, both Trevor Noah, and Gwyneth Paltrow have publicly lauded the strength and internal wellness of Black women.