I'm continuing my way through Jacquelyn Grant's White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus. In my reading today, Dr. Grant talks about how white women participated in the struggle for the rights of African-Americans, one reason (among others) being that racism "propped up notions about White women and repression" (Dr. Grant cites Sara Evans for this statement). I'm not entirely sure what this means, but I have a couple of guesses. For one, the southern slave system---and even the white South after slavery---had a patriarchal attitude towards women. Dr. Grant refers to how the term "southern lady" became an "obscene epithet" in the eyes of Southern white women who desired a change in sex roles (again, Sara Evans' words). I think of Olivia De Haviland's character in Roots: The Next Generation, who said that white Southern women are treated like glass vases, set up over the fireplace to collect dust. Second, white racists continually expressed their desire to protect white women from African-American men, and such an attitude was condescending and patronizing towards those white women (in addition to being hateful towards the African-American men).
But white women experienced sexism in the movement for racial equality. They then fought for women's rights. And yet, according to Dr. Grant, African-American women remained in the movement for racial equality, even as there was racism within the women's rights movement. So there's a lot of alienation.