Motivation

I was rather appalled at the depth and extent of racism rooted in some of the justifications provided for slavery in Professor Fisher’s interesting article. How could generation after generation justify the horrific institution of slavery without noticing the lack of humanity in such beliefs? After I thought about it a little bit more, I now believe that the “positive good” justifications for slavery are rooted in identical or perhaps overlapping ideologies used to justify discrimination against women. I would suspect that there has thus been a high correlation between anti-abolitionists and those who have opposed an increase in women’s rights.

Compare the following two paragraphs, the first verbatim from Professor Fisher’s article and the second substituting just a few key terms of the same excerpt:

“Social and economic relations in the region, so the argument went, are vertical and reciprocal. Inferiors obey and respect their superiors and are rewarded with support and sustenance. . . . Masters enjoy the labor and obedience of their slaves but provide them in return food, housing, moral and religious guidance, and care in their infancy and old age. The net result is a stable, familial, and mutually beneficial labor system . . . .”

“Social and economic relations in the region, so the argument went, are vertical and reciprocal. [Women] obey and respect [men] and are rewarded with support and sustenance. . . . [Men] enjoy [sex] [from] their [wives] but provide them in return food, housing, moral and religious guidance, and care in their infancy and old age. The net result is a stable, familial, and mutually beneficial labor system . . . .”

Although I imagine I am certainly not the first to detect similarities in the ideologies of those supporting the institution of slavery and supporting the enforcement of unfair gender roles, these similarities say a lot. With the substitution of just a few words, we are taken from a “positive good” argument for slavery to a “positive good” argument for the maintenance of unequal gender roles.

This should maybe not be surprising in light of the rest of this week’s reading. One distinct ideology has the ability to inform a variety policy stances, or conversely, a melange and intersection of ideologies come together to inform all policy stances. In either case, that the women’s rights movement and the abolitionist movement occurred within several decades of each other suggests that both might be a product of successfully breaking down a set of ideologies that were ingrained for way too long.