A Soapbox, inspired by this infuriating YouTube video:

“The Suffragette sashes colors […] were a reflection of this historical womens rights movement failing to fight for anyone but white, upper- or middle-class women who were largely comfortable in patriarchal gender roles.” -https://youtu.be/xYo6_cXXy1c

Most early feminists were also flaming abolitionists, to the point that suffrage and women’s rights lagged behind because women were doing the work of promoting women’s rights AND abolition, while the abolitionist menfolk were, by and large, very content to demand their labors on their behalf while leaving them to fend for themselves on behalf of women. Yet, somehow, no one spits on the abolitionist movement as being unworthy of respect. WEIRD.

Lucretia Mott organized the Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1844, which included black women.

In 1840, eight female delegates sailed to England for the World Anti-Slavery Convention. When they got there, the meeting spent the entire first day debating whether women should be allowed to speak, or even be there at all. They were finally allowed to sit quietly in a balcony. One of those women was Lucretia Mott, and it was there that she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was there with her husband.

There’s also, you know, all the working class women, black women, and native women that organized, as well as women dating from Mary Wollstonecraft that were not “comfortable in patriarchal gender roles”, and the heavy involvement of feminists in labor reform, but sure. Yeah. If you ignore history and then squint and look at it sideways, crapping on suffragettes is totally fair and woke and not at all reinforcing of the criticisms they were getting at the time.

It’s super cool to apply the demonstrative woke buzzwords of today to people of the past without a drop of historical relativism, and using that to crap on their legacy, regardless of whether or not they were light years ahead of their contemporaries in terms of “wokeness.” /s

Edit: I started to name feminists that were leaders working for labor reform, against child labor, anti-slavery, pro-equality, etc., but there are too many and it just made me more and more pissed off so I stopped.