Women Divided — But (Hopefully) Not Conquered

Black and white women working across racial lines toward a common vision of American justice is an ideal that has captured the progressive imagination for decades. In 1980, in the first presidential proclamation of Women’s History Week, Jimmy Carter cited both Black and white women — Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman — as being equally important to that vision. A decade earlier, Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a prominent white feminist and a Black Harlem activist, respectively, posed side by side with raised fists in a photo that became instantly iconic for its powerful suggestion that women of all colors were sisters in the struggle together, ideologically and otherwise, even if it didn’t always appear that way.

For most of American history, it certainly didn’t appear that way. The suffragist movement that culminated in the early 20^th century never officially embraced Black women and often actively shut them out, because of its own racist views or because of a fear that racial inclusion would alienate white allies and sink the movement. In the ’60s and ’70s — Steinem and Pitman Hughes’ era — Black women often felt shut out of the feminist narrative created by stifled white suburban housewives whose experiences with male oppression were narrower and qualitatively very different from their own.

Still, the ideal of women as equals in fighting the common enemy of patriarchy permeates Women’s History Month. In highlighting various stories about how individual women overcame oppression, we all raise our fists together. Although the month rightly has been criticized as being too white — of deliberately looking at women’s history through the lens of gender and not race or other circumstances — women’s history means all women, and every year the observance has a challenge to live up to this encompassing ideal.

So far, 2025 has been a very tough year for that ideal. The second Trump administration wasted no time in issuing an early executive order banning DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) activity in the government, resulting in the cancellation of nearly a dozen observances, including Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month and Women’s History Month. It’s a virulently anti-woman and anti-Black presidency made possible, again, by the staunch support of white voters in November. White women were a big part of that support: Fifty-three percent of white women who went to the polls voted for Donald Trump — a similar percentage to 2016 and 2020. (Yes, more Black and brown people voted for the GOP in 2024, but those numbers are small in comparison to votes from white people, the country’s largest ethnic group.) Hence, Republican support from white women hasn’t budged over the past eight years, despite the fact that, since 2016, Trump — among other things — was found liable for sexual abuse and engineered the Supreme Court’s historic overturning of Roe v. Wade, the centerpiece achievement of the modern feminist movement.

All of this has been a major blow to those who care about justice, but especially to Black women, the constituency that was most committed to electing Kamala Harris and refuting the overtly racist and misogynist energy of Trumpism. They were not just disappointed and demoralized by the loss, they felt betrayed by white people in general and white women in particular. Prior to the election, many hoped that white women would turn out in greater numbers to reject Trump, chiefly because of his endangering of abortion rights. Polls repeatedly showed that women as a group supported reproductive choice, and anti-abortion state measures failed in red states like Kansas and Kentucky. It was a sign that reproductive choice would figure into the presidential election, often called the most critical one in modern history. Surely within the Democratic Party, at least, more women would turn out not just to vote for their own personal interests, but to save democracy itself. 

That didn’t happen. Black women are still reeling from both the underwhelming response from white Democratic women and the tyranny of whiteness in general that defines American history and that has sustained Trump. Many Black women last year said they would retreat into self-care, take a break from politics, reassess their priorities. Looking inward, individually and communally, became a thing. For example, Dr. Kristee Haggins, a Sacramento-area psychologist who runs a support/healing circle for Black activists, said in November that “Now, more than ever, we need to be coming together. … I’m hopeful, actually, that in some ways, this will provide an opportunity for us to do so.” Focusing on local politics — on city councils and school board races rather than big national races freighted with big ideologies — is part of that. “It’s about creating whatever avenues we may need to take care of ourselves,” Haggins said. “We’ve got to do it, because nobody’s coming to save us.”

The betrayal was subtle: white Democratic women showed up for Harris, but this wasn’t enough. The passion to preserve abortion rights didn’t turn out to be as motivating as it was expected to be; just as important, the opposition to Trump’s escalating assaults on “wokeism,” especially DEI, also wasn’t as galvanizing as it should have been, even though DEI includes women. White women failed to vigorously oppose anti-racism and sexism, thus failing not just their Black sisters but themselves, too. It’s something we’ve seen before in the long right-wing battle against affirmative action, in which white women who benefited from affirmative action went silent as it became stigmatized as something that exclusively benefited people of color. Whiteness prevailed.

And yet the ideological power of whiteness is not as absolute as it appears. A YouGov poll in February revealed that a majority of Americans, 51%, favor DEI programs, and 44% are neutral about them. Most tellingly, the poll found that 60% of Republicans — the party of Trump — hold unfavorable views about DEI programs, but not toward the ideas of diversity, equity and inclusion. The most optimistic read of this is that, while programs enacting justice have been successfully demonized, the precepts of justice still matter. 

Women will have to unite to some degree around those precepts in order to rebuff Trump, who claims to be saving women, whether they want saving or not, by cracking down on transgender women and otherwise protecting so-called traditional family values. “No longer,” Trump declared in his own recent presidential proclamation on Women’s History Month, “will our Government promote radical ideologies that replace women with men in spaces and opportunities designed for women, or devastate families by indoctrinating our sons and daughters to begin a war with their own bodies.” The 2025 theme is “Moving Forward Together,” but Trumpism is attempting to drag women into a pre-feminism past that diminishes all of us. As with the struggles of Black History Month, Trumpism seeks not to acknowledge women’s struggles but to snuff out struggle altogether. It seeks not to honor history, but to end it. All women have a stake in making sure that doesn’t happen.