For me Molly Brown was not a name that I knew very well. I kept hearing about these stories of the titanic and how she was on it. But after the presentation and going to the Molly Brown house I have grown a new appreciation for this amazing woman. I can now look at her in full perspective and argue yes she was amazing but was she all that she could have been? After the readings and doing a little bit more research on the suffrage movement I feel like Margaret Brown gets all this attention for being very main stream. I look at her life and I see that she really strived to become empowered in the system that she lived in and really wanted to empower other privileged women around her but never the people who don’t have any power in the society. I know the suffrage movement was a big deal to the white women who lived on the higher end of society, but did it really help women of color and the working class women? They were not fighting for jobs, they had to work every day alongside their husbands, and they did not need the right to work. I feel like the suffrage movement was a really good thing for white men because it allowed them to keep the people of color in check, using their wives as a second vote they could out vote lower class groups. So for me I feel like Molly Brown was out spoken for what she cared for but she only did it in the confines of her class and race privilege, if she was alive today I would ask her are you really about making the world a better place for all or are you worried about making the world a better place for you and only people like you?
2 comments:
I would tend to agree; I was struck by the lack of information I could find on the suffrage struggles of lower or working class women. As you noted, however, they were dependent, just as the lower classes often are today, on those with more power and wealth taking on their causes or struggles.
I got the impression that Margaret Brown did advocate for the lower classes--perhaps that was a mistaken impression?
Regardless, however, it is true that the suffrage movement, as well as second wave feminism, were very white, middle-to-upper class women centered as a whole, in both their members and their philosophies.
One would think that anyone of an oppressed group would automatically try to understand and advocate for those of other oppressed groups. Sadly, that does not always seem to be the case. I wonder whether it's because such individuals are still saturated in other ideas of their culture, and, while they question their own oppression, still see members of other groups as 'others' who are beneath them? Or perhaps they are afraid of putting themselves out on another limb, when they're already 'radical' in some way? Do they believe it would hurt their cause?
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