I don’t agree with the article, but as always I find it interesting that people on a board based in the UK insist on seeing race (and particularly discussions of black people and race) as an exclusively US phenomenon. You do realize the UK was involved in the slave trade for hundreds of years, that British people owned plantations across the Caribbean, that the British economy was driven by slavery (see Eric Williams’ work on the slavery economy) and that Britain colonized countries across Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia until the 1960s? And that money, those laws, and that those social and political ideas shaped British society as well?
So no, the corollary in Britain wouldn’t be solely “the working class,” but rather the treatment of Black and brown women across the world in countries where white women serving as missionaries and teachers spread the ideologies of white supremacy. The difference is in the US it was “at home” while in the UK these interactions largely took place abroad in the colonized country (other than nannies /domestics.) But that doesn’t mean women didn’t play a role and that it didn’t affect the politics, views, and conceptions of womanhood - for example, I think of Mary Kingsley who was hailed as a progressive scientist, adventurer and boundary breaking woman but whose memoir of her travels in Africa is of course deeply racist and anti-African.
There is a complex relationship in white women’s roles in colonization and slavery - white women experience patriarchy and rhetoric about black male rapists was used both to control black people AND to control white women’s movements under the guise of white men protecting white women from black male rapists. White women also did abuse black women viciously. White women were also trafficked to the colonies as brides. So white women both had household power over enslaved/people in servitude AND ALSO were victims of patriarchy. To say that shorter, it’s not FEMINISM that goes hand in hand with racism, it’s patriarchy. White women have a complex role within patriarchy as white men use the protection of white women to justify violence against Black and brown people and many women of all races ride hard for patriarchy. And white women, who have relationships with white men as husbands, fathers, sons, etc often defend those men over black and brown women (to be fair just as women all over the world often defend men over women.)
Moving back to the US, it’s absurd though to say the “purpose” of feminism was racism. First of all, what do we mean by feminism? For example, it’s true that the largest womens’ organization for years in Indiana was the Women’s KKK, but I wouldn’t agree the goals of the WKKK were explicitly feminist - most of the rhetoric was around protecting white families including patriarchal and regressive gender roles. I think he’s conflating any organizing by women as feminist when obviously deeply traditional and conservative women also organize. It would be like labelling the Westboro Baptist Church “feminist” because women organized protests in leading roles.
Many progressive feminist women organized for the abolition of slavery as has been stated in this thread - in fact, tactics like the sugar boycott where women realized the political power of controlling the household purchasing income were influential in rising feminist consciousness. Many women took strategies they learned in abolitionist organizing and turned them towards feminist organizing.
Feminist women also were instrumental in things like prohibition - at the time they saw domestic violence caused by alcohol as a danger especially to working class women, so the simplistic parody of these women simply as misguided prudes ignores that we still don’t have good solutions. We can look back now and say prohibition was silly and middle class meddling, but that misses the complexities of trying to navigate social problems. The Eugenicism shared not only by feminist women but by many progressive men as well is less defensible and clearly classist, ableist and racist, but which of our views will or will not hold up 100 years from now? One hopes that those in the future will be baffled and horrified by us because it would mean we have moved forward - would that negate all our acts and views? Would it be fair for them to say “all” our feminism was based on those negative things?
The eugenics argument against some feminists while true is manipulated weaponized by anti-abortion men who try to pretend therefore birth control is a white supremacist plot to kill (Black male) babies. There’s a huge rhetoric targeting Black women’s rights to reproductive care by saying that abortion and birth control were designed by white women to convince us to kill our babies blah blah blah. So what men like this are really about is to try to convince black women that the patriarchy is our culture and abortions are bad and evil. But of course don’t want to look at men’s roles in making/raising babies.
In fact, this rhetoric is what is actually racist. It’s well documented that under Nixon (this is in a U.S. context obviously) that the Moynihan report was explicitly used to inject rhetoric around black women’s liberation harming Black men and the black family. Because black women have always been the root of the family and play organizing roles in community, Moynihan deliberately created rhetoric around Black women emasculating black men and the need for black men to take back their families and manhood. This set up black women as the enemy and black men as the victims of black women. This is a deeply sexist and racist idea of black women as masculine, emasculating, bad mothers, angry, overbearing and so forth. This was picked up by black male leaders - but it was a deliberate attack on black communities by attacking women.
This type of black man, just like sexist white men, sees black men as the only victims while ignoring the huge rates of sexual and domestic violence against black women. This was exactly why black feminism formed - because black women’s experiences were ignored by the mainstream feminist movement, while black women’s leadership and lives were ignored in civil rights/Black power. One of the early texts was called “All the women are white, all the blacks are men.” Black women organized in civil rights and taught King much about organizing but have been erased. I know some here have absorbed a negative view of intersectionality but if you actually read Crenshaw’s original essay it’s not about “identity politics” or “oppression Olympics,” it’s identifying and explaining these issues. She has a whole section about the rape of black women and the histories of sexual violence in enslavement and segregation, and a whole section about the development of Black feminist thought.
Hazel Carby is well worth reading about the UK context and this article has some names and histories: https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/black-feminism-united-kingdom