White women and women of color are divided by certain historic reasons besides the various conflicts that come from our basic differences and oppression.  Activist white women such as Lucretia Mott who founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and Susan B. Anthony, worked closely with black men to get the right to vote for males of color and men were involved in the fight for women’s suffrage. Frederick Douglass, the only African-American at the Seneca Valley Convention, was one of the thirty-two men who signed the Declaration of Sentiments.

However, once men of color got the right to vote, many deserted the cause of getting the vote for women because the law did little to change reality that went way beyond the right to vote including lynching. Although at the time, even more then today, woman were being killed by domestic violence, Douglass explained “When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.”

While Anthony and Douglass remained life-long friends, many white suffragettes such as Cady Stanton developed alliances with southern whites knowing they had an additional overt agenda to disenfranchise all people of color.  Meanwhile all carried the embedded racism of their time and many of the activist women, even those in the middle class, were able to do their activist work because at home there was a woman of color cleaning their house and caring for their children.

Historically there were important reasons for the collusion and participation of white women with violence against women of color and even other women of European descent.  During the burning time in Europe, which lasted 200 years, from 1500-1700, women who didn’t conform to the patriarchy were hunted, tortured, raped and executed.  Some records show as many as nine million women were murdered during this period although more conservative estimates put the number at 60,000 killed.  *1.

Contrary to popular belief these women, for the most part, did not participate in practices associated with witchcraft. Most were not herbal healers or engaged in Wicca rituals. They were ordinary women, sometimes people who expressed opinions or insisted on their own sense of agency.  They were tortured and killed with the justification that women by our very nature were too weak, vulnerable and stupid to escape the influence of the devil.  This justification was written into the confessions composed by the priests and executioners.  These were read aloud at weekly sermons and public executions. *2.

This indelibly wrote in the subconscious of everyone that women deserved violence and cruelty because we were spiritually depraved.  There were a death penalty laws in much of Europe against being a witch.  In Germany special prisons and courts were built including in one town an oven where in a 9-year period over 1,000 females, including 2-4 year old girls were killed. However, it isn’t only the actual deaths that had an impact but the cultural shift as women developed ways of protecting themselves, sometimes by implicating another woman. Another serious impact that is currently being investigated with both Jewish and Native American holocaust survivors is that trauma can be genetically passed down through intergenerational transmission of trauma effects.  *3.

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