To not want to hear anything about the suffragettes

[BrandNewAndImproved]

How am I meant to support a movement that was disgustingly racist just because I benefit from it being a white female.

The feminist movement is still subtly racist with a lot of white feminists refusing to see white privilege.

The argument of being of its time doesn't wash. Racism is racism and I refuse to support it.

Where has the slave trade been "glamorised" on this thread? I hope you're not implying that was behind my post.

Oh, this is about the Rebal/Slave t-shirts?

If not, can someone please translate?

I don't think you're unreasonable. I'm sick of hearing about it too. Nobody talks down to working class mums from a council estate than proper speaking 'highly educated' suit wearing women proclaiming to be feminists bankrolled by their husbands

Rebel/Slave, obviously

There were WC suffragettes, sproket. Although, of course, they didn't have the time and resources to demonstrate, risk imprisonment etc that others had.

It was of its time. YABU to expect people who were involved in the suffragette movement 100 years ago to have held themselves to todays standards. They weren't an anti-racism movement, they were about getting women - all women - the vote and they achieved that.

It was Meryl Streep in the - again, of its time - quote t-shirt that got the twitter outraged all fired up. 'Slave' did not have the connotations then that it has now.

And why is it always feminists who have to fight for every single cause anyway? Campaigners in the gay rights movement don't get asked what they are doing for race equality, people in the civil rights movement weren't asked what they were doing to help the gay rights movement, but everybody, even MRAs (!) want to know what feminists are planning to do for them. Feminism is about gender equality, for all women. Black women got the vote too.

My friend wouldn't say SHE is opressed. She I better educated than me , attended grammar school and received greater career support and choices.
She was told she could be anything and it was expected she would go on to university. My school prepared us for the lower paid workforce and no one even mentioned university.

We are moving forward though. Small steps as someone said above.
Yesterdays feminist protesters were from all backgrounds inc a specialist Asian refuge.
In the 1100s we wiped out a Jewish community in York.
Not so long ago we sent the poor to workhouses and single mothers to laundries where they were treated awfully.
In the 1940s we sent children away from their parents to be used as farm labour and lied about their parents being dead.
In the 70s we were still punishing men for being gay.
Not so very long ago my aunt who has the same sn as my child was locked away in an institute and received electric shock treatment and was treated very cruelly while locked away with people who terrified and attacked her while being made to work for nothing for having learning difficulties.

We are moving forward.

Drunk OP?

Have you met any of those plebs nowadays tho accidental? Sneering middle class women who were put through uni by daddy and now supported by some drip of a husband showing up at our community centre trying to tell us commoners what we're doing wrong in our lives, brushing us off with sniggers and speaking to us like kids because we don't speak proper and we wear leggins and adidas hoodies.

Got to love a thread where the OP realises that she is talking shit so she fucks off to Google goes to bed

wowfudge I linked that article for the Countess not to back up any of my argument. The telegraph article linked however she's state black women were probably not welcomed into the movement.

The feminist don't have to fight every single cause, however the main crusade of feminism is to make women equal to men. If black women still aren't equal to white women then we can't just say oh well white mc women are equal so we've done our job. Women are women no matter the colour and should be equal.

Brokenvases the I have black friend who doesn't feel oppressed argument is bollocks. It is a fact black women still earn less for the same job as white women. White supremacy is still going on. There's a brilliant thread in the feminist topic if you'd like to have a read. Just because your friend had opportunities doesn't mean shit really and I mean that nicely.

spoke I love leggings and Adidas hoodies and agree.

Why should my dd earn less because she's not white and then I should applaud the suffragettes and feminist movement. They haven't finished what they started plus the racist start to it all thrown in leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

They haven't finished what they started. Intersectionality is a massive issue. Black, poor, majority world voices aren't heard or are actively silenced. However, I'm still glad I have the vote.

I do think you need to separate out the Suffragettes (Emmeline's DPs were abolitionists so better than most at that time) and modern feminism.

Part of the reason black women (and black men) can be paid less for the same work is because there is no salary transparency, something feminists have campaigned for. If equal work for equal pay is ever fully realized it will benefit everyone who gets literally short-changed because they don't fit the straight white male mould.

I am interested in that topic though - particularly in how black women want feminism to work for them, and how things need to change. I do see that there are problematic areas. I have a vague memory of being embarrassed by an Oscars speech last year that excluded women of colour and lesbians (I think it was something like 'gay people, lift us up, black people lift us up', without mentioning the cross-sectionality in those groups.) Personally I think that if women, minority races and lgbtq people announced an intention to fully merge causes and press forward together, every bigot in the country would instantly fill their trousers...

Do you have statistics.
I'm googling and can find data on black women being paid less than white men (as are white women) but cannot find UK based statistics for white women/black women data

I'm not saying its not try btw I am just interested in the statistics.

*true
Sorry I hate this phone!

The issue of modern women of colour being treated differently, negatively, to white women is a totally separate discussion.

The fact is that no woman, white or otherwise, would have any fucking rights at all without the Suffragettes and to try and denigrate what they did just makes you look foolish.

If you want to address the disparity between the way that women of different races are treated then, for the sake of all of us, please do that. But dont confuse the matter with rhetoric about something that happened over a century ago and has no bearing on that issue.

Well, of course, what bogeyface said!

I hope you have your husband's permission to be on here then.

I'm a BME woman, proud to be a feminist.
The struggle started by the suffragettes has benefitted me and every other woman who wants to vote, drive a car, rent or own a home, get a job, or just have a life that isn't being a chattel of some man.

It's really illogical to be angry at feminists because we haven't yet won the struggle; better add your shoulder to the wheel, to speed things up.

The claim that feminism is Western or racist typically comes from countries, groups or individual idiots, who claim it is imposing Western cultural values when we campaign against FGM or against the enslavement / beheading / flogging / stoning to death of women.

Well, I consider it racist if someone says that a woman with brown or black skin is not entitled to the same basic human rights as white women, whether in the West or anywhere else.

Examining historical heroes too closely can be uncomfortable, but post-WW2 progress in human rights has been as dramatic as in science & new gadgets.
We aren't surprised people didn't have iPads a century or a millenium ago.

e.g. The US Declaration of Independence in 1776 is regarded worldwide as a milestone for democracy and anti-imperialism. Yet the US constitution defined the worth of a slave to be 3/5 that of a white person.

We could despise George Washington and his fellow revolutionaries for being slave-owners - and use that as a reason to reject their anti-imperialist revolution - or we could just accept that they were progressive in some ways, but as blind to the evil of slavery as others of their time.

Many suffragettes were also involved in the slavery abolitionist campaigns of the time. You can read many of the original suffragette speeches and pamphlets online. Judging a whole movement on the basis of a few prominent suffragettes is VUB. If I look at the well known feminists in the media today, I know they do not accurately represent the feminist movement.

I really don't follow your argument OP (sorry) but you seem to be suggesting that because we don't have racial equality (agree, we don't and this is awful) it is wrong to fight for gender equality?
I can't see that it is racist to be feminist and I haven't read anything that suggests the suffragettes were any more racist than other people. It just wasn't the cause they were fighting for surely?
The slave statement on those T-shirts is insensitive... and can see that it sort of says that you could chose to be a rebel or a slave when, of course, people in true slavery did not have the luxury of choice. I don't think she was saying she'd rather be a rebel because she thinks she's better than slaves but rather that she doesn't want to be passive whilst being treated as inferior.
Comparing anything to slavery could be seen as belittling the horrors of slavery but I can't see that this was the intention at the time. It was a catchy sounding statement that people have latched on to without really thinking about possible connotations

I very much doubt any racist sentiment behind the wearing of the T-shirts.
Based on the fact that the people that I have come across who hold racist views also seem to be sexist and homophobic, I would imagine that men and women who are interested in gender equality may be less likely to be racist than people who do not want equality for women?

How quickly we forget that white women have been oppressed for literally centuries. We make some movement towards equality and are told we're a bunch of racist bitches. The misogynistic behaviour of the civil rights movement is always conveniently overlooked.
I'm also not sure why white slavery is ignored by people too.

Context is all.