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HOW WILL WHITE WOMEN VOTE? IT’S A QUESTION WITH A FRAUGHT HISTORY.
 
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Nikole Hannah-Jones
November 2, 2024
New York Times
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_ White and Black women have joined together to power progressive
causes — from abolition to civil rights — but it’s a tenuous
alliance. _

A 1970 march in New York City on the 50th anniversary of the passage
of the 19th Amendment., John Olson/The LIFE Picture
Collection/Shutterstock

 

With a closely contested election just days away, much attention has
been paid in recent weeks to whether enough Black men are willing to
vote for a Black woman for president. The argument goes that Black men
may be the obstacle to Kamala Harris’s defeating Donald Trump —
and becoming the first female president. In a video that went viral,
former President Barack Obama chided Black men for maybe not wanting
to support Harris because she’s a woman; some polling shows her
Black-male support slipping. News networks devoted numerous segments
to pundits’ raising the alarm about the ambivalence of some Black
men to a Harris presidency. Harris, responding to the concern in the
final stretch of the campaign, released her “Opportunity Agenda for
Black Men.”

But this framing has obscured a significant truth: Polling shows that
a clear majority of Black men, some 69 percent according to an October
2024 Times/Siena Poll, support Harris. The only group supporting
Harris at a higher rate than Black men is Black women, at 81 percent.
There is one group, however, that deserves more attention as they
could very well determine this election: white women.

At about 59 million voters, white women constitute this nation’s
single largest voting bloc, and also its most divided. About 53
percent of white female voters
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as or lean Republican, compared with 43 percent who identify as or
lean Democrat, according to the Pew Research Center. (White women
without college degrees are much more likely to lean Republican, while
a majority of those with college degrees align with the Democratic
Party; education levels among Black and Latino women do not have a
significant impact on their party affiliation.) While a majority
of _all _American women have voted for a Democrat for president
since 1996, white women have not. In fact, a majority of white women
have cast their ballots for the Democrat running for president just
once since 1968
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and that one time was not for Hillary Clinton but for her husband,
Bill, in 1996.

Black men, on the other hand, have already proved they will vote for a
woman for president. In 2016, eight of 10 Black men voted for Hillary
Clinton in her historic run. The only two groups where a majority did
not support Clinton were white men and white women. Despite
Clinton’s running against an opponent who was facing multiple
sexual-assault cases, who was exposed in the infamous “Access
Hollywood” tapes bragging about grabbing women’s genitals and who
promised to seat Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v.
Wade, just 45 percent of white women voted for Clinton, compared with
98 percent of Black women.
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polls show that 51 percent of white women say they will vote for Trump
over Harris.

That could end up being the most important number for Harris. If
indeed she becomes the first woman to breach the 235-year unbroken
line of men ascending to the highest office in the land, it may very
well be because white women do something they have long struggled to
do: align their interests with those of Black women. In an election
where our very democracy may be at risk, the stakes could not be
higher. History shows us that advances toward equal rights in this
nation can come to pass when white women join with Black Americans to
fight for a common cause, but that same history reveals how fragile
that alliance can be.

The Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in
July.Credit...Francis Chung/Politico, via Associated Press

THE TWO GREATEST movements for women’s rights in this nation —
the suffragist movement and the women’s liberation movement — were
each rooted in Black freedom struggles. Each historical example
demonstrates the transformative potential when white women act in
solidarity, not with white men as they so often do, but with Black
women. But each also demonstrates the fickleness of white women when
it comes to that solidarity.

The movement for women’s rights was born of the abolitionist
movement, when Black and white women began to contemplate their
distinct rights. For white women who believed ending slavery was a
moral and religious issue, participating in abolitionist gatherings
and activism gave them an early taste of political involvement and the
ability to assert their own thoughts and beliefs in the public square.

 

Most women at the time could not vote or hold public office. They were
explicitly excluded from most colleges and professions and often could
not be a party to contracts or in many cases own property. For Black
women, who toiled under dual oppressions for being both Black and
female, the struggle for racial and gender equality could not be
separated. Through abolitionism and the argument of natural rights
that underpinned it, some white women also began to question the way
white men discriminated against them. “The investigation of the
rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own,”
wrote Angelina Grimké, who along with her sister Sarah Grimké left
their slaveholding Southern family for a life in Philadelphia, where
they converted to Quakerism and became abolitionists.

In 1837, at the First Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, an
interracial group of 200 women gathered and for the first time called
publicly for women’s rights. But this alliance would soon break
down. White women were using organizing skills they learned from the
abolitionist movement to fight for their own rights. But when they
convened the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, considered the first
gathering dedicated exclusively to women’s rights in the United
States, they did not invite Black women. Only one Black person was in
attendance — a fugitive from slavery named Frederick Douglass. He
was largely responsible for the convention’s publishing a
declaration in support of female suffrage. And yet white women soon
abandoned their common struggle with Black women specifically and
Black people in general. In the aftermath of the Civil War, when Black
men finally achieved the franchise with ratification of the 15th
Amendment, many white suffragists, such as Susan B. Anthony, were
angered that Black men had gotten there first.

In the ensuing decades, suffragist leaders continued to exclude Black
women from their efforts to gain the vote in a strategy that became
known as “expediency.” The argument, according to the historian
Paula Giddings, was that including Black women in the suffragist
effort would make it harder to pass an amendment for women’s
suffrage, but that once white women got the vote, the franchise for
Black women would soon follow. “The old warhorses of the suffrage
movement Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony did believe in
the female franchise as a panacea to the nation’s ills,” Giddings
writes in her seminal book, “When and Where I Enter: The Impact of
Black Women on Race and Sex in America,” and considered white women
a counterbalance to white men and the injustices Black Americans
experienced. But Black women considered this naïve: Some of the worst
abuse, oppression and exclusion they experienced came at the hands of
white women.

In making the case for their own enfranchisement, some white women
argued that giving white women the vote would help maintain white
hegemony in a country experiencing demographic and political change.
Instead of allying with Black women, who shared their oppression as
women, they leaned into anti-Black and anti-immigrant sentiment.

The policy of expediency promised that white women would support Black
women once they secured the vote for themselves. But when the 19th
Amendment was finally ratified, most leading white suffragists rebuked
pleas from Black women to pressure the federal government to enforce
voting rights for Black women in the South, who faced threats and
violence at the polls. “No women are free until all are free,”
proclaimed a 1921 resolution by Black suffragists. But for the next
four decades, Black women fought with little support from white women,
facing beatings, bombings and assassinations, before they finally
secured their vote with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Suffragists celebrating their victory following the passing of the
19th Amendment in 1920. Bettmann/Getty Images

Even after abandoning their Black sisters, white women did not get the
full equality they sought. By the 1960s, despite gaining the right to
vote, women remained second-class citizens in the United States. Laws
and policies enacted by white men allowed women of all races to be
openly and legally excluded from jobs, housing and institutions of
higher learning, and they could be prohibited from getting credit
cards or loans without a man to co-sign. In many states, women did not
even have the right to turn down sex from their husbands, as spousal
rape was legal.

Once again, it would be the struggle for Black people’s rights that
paved the way for white women to achieve theirs. The Civil Rights Act
of 1964, the most sweeping civil rights law passed since
Reconstruction, made it illegal to discriminate against Black
Americans in public spaces, education and employment. But it also
became the first federal law — almost as a fluke — to make it
illegal to discriminate against women in employment.

When Congress was deliberating over the bill, a segregationist
congressman named Howard Smith added a protection against gender
discrimination in employment, believing that including women as a
protected class in the bill could tank it. He inserted the word
“sex” to Title VII of the bill. To the surprise of many, the bill
passed anyway.

This “first legislative victory for women’s rights sneaked in
through the back door of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” the
journalist Clara Bingham writes in “The Movement: How Women’s
Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973.” “The one word that
Smith added changed the course of women’s history.”

 

A brilliant Black civil rights lawyer and strategist named Pauli
Murray had lobbied Congress to include a prohibition of sex
discrimination in the 1964 act. In fighting against racial
discrimination, she had faced her share of gender discrimination, and
so upon its passage, Murray promoted the idea that women needed to
form their own civil rights organization, what she called an
N.A.A.C.P. for women. She and other Black women joined with a cadre of
white women activists, who like the suffragists before them
experienced a political awakening while working within civil rights
organizations. In 1966, Murray and a biracial group of 49 women
founded NOW, the National Organization for Women.

This era would mark a cataclysmic change in the rights of American
women, with lawsuits successfully challenging discrimination in
employment and education and wages, and with women’s winning the
right to access birth control and abortion and own their own homes and
get their own credit cards. Using the 14th Amendment, which was
enacted at the end of slavery to ensure Black Americans equal
protection of the law, activists won a landmark Supreme Court case
that recognized women as a “protected class.”

But while some white women, such as Gloria Steinem, worked hard to
ensure the movement was inclusive, many other white feminists did not
see the need to intertwine the struggle for Black liberation with the
struggle for women’s liberation. By the late 1960s, the women’s
movement was ascending even as the civil rights and Black Power
movements were disintegrating. White-dominated feminist groups failed
to endorse Shirley Chisholm, the first woman to run for president in
one of the two major political parties, in 1972. Over time, many of
the movement’s Black founders, such as Pauli Murray, became
disillusioned and distanced themselves from mainstream feminist
organizations.

The attitude that many Black women had toward white feminists during
this period was summed up by Toni Morrison, who asked in an essay in
1971 in The New York Times
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“What do black women feel about Women’s Lib? Distrust. It is
white, therefore suspect.” She went on: “In spite of the fact that
liberating movements in the black world have been catalysts for white
feminism, too many movements and organizations have made deliberate
overtures to enroll blacks and have ended up by rolling them.” Black
women, she continued, “know that racism is not confined to white
men, and that there are more white women than men in this country.”
She recalled that it was white women who were the face of ugly
opposition to school and housing integration in the North and the
South. They were both oppressed and oppressor. And as the historian
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae has written in The Times,
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women helped knit white supremacy “into the fabric of their
communities.”

IN 1972, ACCORDING to Giddings’s book, just 45 percent of white
women favored “efforts to strengthen or change women’s status in
society,” while 62 percent of Black women did. That same poll showed
that only 35 percent of white women sympathized with the women’s
liberation movement, compared with 67 percent of Black women. And by
the late 1970s, the tide began to turn against the women’s movement
as it had against the civil rights movement. White women helped foment
the backlash. Led by the attorney and Republican activist Phyllis
Schlafly, conservatives coalesced around an opposition to civil rights
and feminism. They joined with white men to help prevent the
ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have enshrined
gender equality in the Constitution. “The problem was, after the Roe
decision,” said the activist Nancy Stearns. “our side went
home.”

By the 1980s, as American women began to consolidate behind the
Democratic Party and its more progressive agenda, white women
diverged. The timing was not coincidental. This was the period when
substantial majorities of Black Americans and other people of color
began to vote for Democrats. Many of those voters had immigrated to
the United States after a 1965 law eliminated a racist immigration
quota system.

In a 2019 study, “The Gender Gap Is a Race Gap: Women Voters in
U.S. Presidential Election,”
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by the political scientists Jane Junn and Natalie Musuoka in the
journal Perspectives on Politics, analyzed white women’s voting
patterns in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 elections. The study found that
white women’s race — more than their religious beliefs, income or
education — predicted their support for Republican candidates.
Outside party affiliation, race, specifically, identifying as white,
is the only variable “that is consistently significant across all
three elections,” the study concluded.

A campaign rally in Wisconsin in August.Credit...Kamil
Krzaczynski/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images

Despite the headwinds Clinton faced in 2016, following Barack
Obama’s historic presidency, Clinton hoped to make history herself.
Her campaign slogan, “I’m With Her,” leaned into her candidacy
and set a sharp contrast between her and her opponent. Trump, who
consistently made misogynistic and racist remarks, ran partly on his
promise to overturn women’s 50-year constitutional right to
abortion, considered one of the greatest and most important victories
of the women’s liberation movement. Clinton vowed to protect that
right, and many pundits predicted that Clinton would overperform among
women.

And she did overperform. Some 54 percent of _all_ women voted for
Clinton; 41 percent of men did — the largest gender gap in a
presidential election in more than 35 years, according to the Center
for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
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But a majority of white women did not vote for Clinton. In real
numbers, more white women voted for Trump than white men. Had white
women voted like other women, the gender barrier to the nation’s
highest office would have been broken and Donald Trump would not have
become president.

IN 2024, BECAUSE of the Trump presidency, many women for the first
time find themselves living in a country where abortion is illegal. We
are seeing stories now of women — even those who wanted their
pregnancies — bleeding out, dying or nearly dying or losing their
ability to ever have children. Infant-mortality rates have risen since
Roe was overturned and millions of women lost abortion access,
according to a study
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this month by JAMA Pediatrics. And because of the Trump presidency,
many Black Americans for the first time in their lives find themselves
living in a country where affirmative action is illegal, leading to
the elimination of race-conscious policies across American
institutions that were born of the civil rights movement, leaving many
fearing that already gaping racial opportunity gaps will only get
worse.

It is not incidental that the reversal of women’s rights has
coincided with the backlash against the Black Lives Matter protests of
2020, the rollback in civil rights for Black Americans and the
conservative anti-diversity crusades. “Historical patterns suggest
that just as Black women are vital to Black movements, so Black
movements are vital to the progress of feminist movements,” Giddings
writes. “Feminism has always had the greatest currency in times of
Black militancy or immediately thereafter.” She goes on,
“Conversely, new gains for women become more difficult to attain
when Black issues are not high on the national agenda or the national
consciousness.”

In 2020, the common refrain was that Black women, who organized and
helped turn key states such as Georgia in the presidential election
and ensured Democratic control of the Senate, saved democracy. Now
white women are being called to do the same.

In an election where the failure to support a Black woman could usher
in the second presidency of a man who is threatening to jail his
opponents and put millions of people in camps before deporting them,
and who the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark
Milley, has warned is a fascist and the “most dangerous person to
this country,” some are taking up that call.

Shannon Watts, founder of Moms for Demand Action, a gun-safety group,
in July gathered 164,000 white women on a “White Women for Kamala”
Zoom call following a similar call organized by Jotaka Eaddy, founder
of Win With Black Women a few days before that drew 44,000 Black women
and raised $1.5 million. “My role has become to help white women
understand the political and economic power they have to make the
world better for everyone, not just their own family or their own
community,” Watts told The 19th*
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organization named after the amendment. “We are the largest single
voting bloc, and yet many of these women — a majority of these women
— in recent presidential elections have voted in a way that upholds
white supremacy, that upholds the patriarchy.”

A few weeks later, on the night Harris was to accept her own historic
nomination as the first Black woman to lead the top of the ticket of a
major party, Hillary Clinton, wearing suffragist white just as she did
when she accepted the nomination, called on all women to unite behind
Harris. Walking out to a standing ovation that roared on for more than
two minutes, Clinton stood in the same city where NOW was founded 58
years earlier, and traced her own lineage through Shirley Chisholm.
Clinton said that she and her forebears put “cracks in the highest,
hardest, glass ceiling” and on the other side of that ceiling, she
saw freedom. And that freedom, she said, would be embodied by
Harris’s doing what Clinton had not been able to do: become the
first woman to serve as president. “Because my friends,” Clinton
said, looking out at a rapt audience waving “When We Fight, We
Win” signs, “when a barrier falls for one of us, it falls and
clears the way for all of us.”

The question remains: Will enough white women help knock that barrier
down? The motto of Harris’s campaign is that it’s time for
Americans to turn the page on Trump, but if indeed we do, if democracy
is preserved, it may hinge on white women’s finally turning the page
on their own past.

_Nikole Hannah-Jones
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correspondent for The New York Times Magazine covering racial
injustice and civil rights._

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